


Warm Machine

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Series: Loaded Smiles - VictoRian Drabbles [1]
Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Awkwardness, Bloodplay, Breathplay, Claiming sex, Cutting, Edgeplay, Established Relationship, Fighting, First Meetings, First Time, Flirting, Hand Jobs, Kissing, M/M, Rimming, Rough Sex, Sass, Toxic Relationship, medical examinations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-11 16:42:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 44,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4443845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"I will try to make the evening as painless as possible," Frankenstein says in lieu of a greeting. "Neither you nor I wish to take up the other’s time beyond necessity."</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Dorian takes a step back, and just in time as the doctor bustles past, bag in hand. He drops it to the floor at his feet and casts a glance around the entryway, darkened with corona’d shadows dancing against walls papered in patterns of acanthus leaves.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“I’m going to need better lighting.”</i>
</p><p>And so they meet...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> We are in love with this pairing, VictoRian is not particularly common but ho-lordy is it worth the fun. A LOT more to come for these two from us. We hope you enjoy them!

_Sir Malcolm has asked that anyone involved in our organization undergo a physical, anomaly. This is especially pertinent considering your recent contact, rumored to be excessive, with a known consumptive. Recommend examination at earliest convenience._

_VF_

\---

Dorian follows the flourish on the _F_ and folds the slip of paper away again. There’s hardly a time that isn’t convenient for him, truthfully, every day idling into the next almost without notice. He only knows dusk from dawn by the need to light candles, but each wick snapping bright beneath his match burns a curiosity in his chest.

The sun has set, and darkness approaches.

Or the doctor, anyway.

A guest is a guest, and the little barb among the curt and careful script did not go without notice. He’s not met the man, though he’s certainly heard tell of him. Each one, it seems, has been passing the other as a spectre comprised of rumors, leaving whispers in their wake.

In a fit of whimsy, and the mild realization that he’s yet to eat since several sunsets before, Dorian arranges an after-supper repast of summer-sweet berries. Bright and succulent against the silver service and white damask tablecloth beneath, he amuses himself by ensuring that no same berry touches another, an activity that grows more amusing with each sip of sherry he confirms.

If the doctor insists on being crude before they’ve even had the opportunity to meet, then Dorian can’t be helped in wanting to make the proposed examination an entertaining one.

To his credit, at least, the doctor is not late. And with the amount of sherry warming Dorian's smile, he notes how pleasantly young the doctor is, pleasantly frumpy and yet put-together. He has not slept for several nights, it seems, and another sip of the sweet liquid allows Dorian to hold his presented politeness, and not ask the doctor to bed.

Due to concerns for his own well-being, of course.

"I will try to make the evening as painless as possible," Frankenstein says in lieu of a greeting. "Neither you nor I wish to take up the other’s time beyond necessity."

Dorian takes a step back, and just in time as the doctor bustles past, bag in hand. He drops it to the floor at his feet and casts a glance around the entryway, darkened with corona’d shadows dancing against walls papered in patterns of acanthus leaves.

“I’m going to need better lighting.”

Accepting the overcoat thrust towards him, Dorian’s smile curves a little wider. He hangs it on the brass rack beside the door, fingers smoothing down snow-damp wool. Well-worn, far from new. Missing a button.

“I’m afraid we’ve not been set up for gaslights yet.”

“You’re joking.”

“It’s an expansive property,” Dorian explains, taking another sip as he passes by the young man fidgeting with his waistcoat to lead him towards the reception room. “And expensive. It seems a great deal of trouble to go through, anyway, and there’s a certain charm that comes from candlelight, don’t you agree?”

He stops, turning to face the doctor, and offers both his hand and a smile. “Dorian Gray. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

The doctor regards him a moment more before straightening his shoulders, holding his hand out in turn. It’s rough, fingers used to labor, intricate suturing and delicate scalpel work. His grip is hardly strong, though it bodes better to assume that it is for lack of interest rather than a lack of strength.

“As I have about you,” he replies, pleasant enough. “Victor Frankenstein. And charming as candlelight would be for a dinner, it is hardly helpful when it comes to a medical examination, Mr. Gray. Have you oil lamps?”

“Several.”

The doctor blinks, head tilting and the tiny muscles beneath his eyes twitching to narrow them.

“And in working order?”

“But of course.”

There is a moment, then, where perhaps a shadow of a smile skims those sharp, pale features, but as quick as it came, it passes. Dorian wonders, briefly, what it would take to return it; he certainly knows it would be worth the effort.

“Might I trouble you for the use of two of them?” Victor asks patiently.

Dorian’s brows lift, and he breathes a laugh.

“No trouble at all,” he says. Turning to continue on down the towering hall, he sweeps open a door to the reception room. Despite its enormous size, the damp chill of London in winter doesn’t seem to have found this place. A fire rustles in the fireplace, prickling heat into a pleasant shiver through Dorian as he carries on. Across every available wall are portraits of men and women, families and children, so high to the ceiling that to have hung them must have been a feat in itself. It is sparsely appointed, mostly empty in fact but for a few sideboards and a small table, several plush velvet couches and a chaise pushed near to the fire.

“Can you tell me what this might entail, Victor?”

“Doctor.”

“Doctor,” Dorian corrects, without missing a gracious beat. The quick narrowing of his eyes has eased by the time he’s found his half-empty bottle of sherry, refilling his own glass and topping off another. Both are brought back as if presented by a hunter victorious. “I’m afraid this isn’t something with which I’m particularly familiar.”

He makes no sign of going to get the oil lamps, nor of summoning someone else to do so. Of course, there is no one else here to do so, but Dorian doesn’t find it especially pressing to so quickly leave his visitor’s side.

Victor regards the offered alcohol with the same boredom and disdain he has, so far, directed toward everything in the house - Dorian included. He draws a breath to release it as a put-upon sigh.

“It is merely precaution. Exposure to consumption could mean transmission as easily as it could nothing at all. But we can’t be too careful.” The doctor takes the offered glass only when Dorian doesn’t take it away, and just as easily sets it down to the side table, hands coming to rest gently flexed before him. 

He’s so proper. Dorian can’t help but bite his lip at the thought.

“Unfortunately the procedure could be considered intrusive,” Victor adds, expression impassive, though his eyes deliberately seek away from Dorian to a spot just behind him, careful to remain professional. “But should I find nothing amiss, it is something easily forgotten.”

Victor purses his lips and with another gentle sigh and a languid blink, returns his light eyes to Dorian. “The lamps, please? I would hate to keep you longer than necessary.”

Dorian’s lips part, pale eyes blinking wide. His smile falters but only for a moment, replaced instead by a smaller version of what was there before, still polite. He inclines his head and takes his glass with, boot heels clicking against the marble floor until he reaches the door.

“There are wild berries there, if you’d like,” he offers, a note of hope - or at least geniality - lifting his voice into the hollow room’s distant corners. “I’ve had them brought in from the south of Spain. The strawberries are especially -”

“I’ve already eaten, thank you.”

“- sweet,” Dorian concludes. He watches the doctor’s terse movements, working the buttons free on his snug waistcoat, and turns to go.

Were one inclined to be frank, the positive remarks Dorian has heard about the young doctor were attributed entirely to his capabilities in medicine. _Brilliant_ , _genius_ , _advancing medical science_ and other dreary laudations that in their specificity conveyed a great deal. Never has heard of any gentility attributed to the doctor; never any praise for his bedside manner.

Dorian seeks out two brass oil lamps from a cabinet in one of the spare sitting rooms, and blows the dust from them.

Absence of praise is often more telling than the presence of it.

He finishes his sherry in one pull and sighs rough with it, snaring up the bottle of oil to continue back.

“You know,” he announces, refusing to let his eyes linger on the doctor’s bared forearms, sleeves ruched to his elbows. “You’ve told me how I ought to feel about this examination, and not the examination itself. I imagine I might feel a great deal less discomfort were I to know what you intend to do with me.”

Victor looks up, and for a moment regards Dorian with an expression more open than any other since he set foot into the house. A beat, another, and this sigh is hardly put-upon. He seems to soften.

“I apologize,” he says. “I forget that for those not performing such examinations on a daily basis the process is unfamiliar and uncomfortable.” He shrugs, lifts his eyes a little higher towards the ceiling, following the seemingly endless frames and portraits there. “I spend too much time around those who don’t ask questions, I suppose.”

It is as much an apology as he can give, not knowing what else to say beyond that. He swallows and regards his patient a moment longer before delving into answering the question actually posed him.

“I will check your eyes and the pupil dilation, ears, teeth and throat and swallowing,” the doctor lists. “Lung capacity and heart rate will be compared to the average of those your age and class, to check for abnormalities. I will need to take a blood sample,” he adds.

Dorian’s mild insult eases, as when ruffled feathers smooth straight again. He regards the untouched berries, each pristinely arranged, and plucks up a strawberry to chew while he oils and lights the lamps.

“Nothing to be concerned about then,” Dorian says.

“Not in the process of examination, no.”

“But in the results?”

“I’m not a psychic,” Victor responds. “If I could guess your results I’d hardly need the examination.”

His tone is dry - no, more than dry. Matter-of-fact. Dorian laughs, brightening, and turns with a lamp in each hand to face him.

“Where should I set them? There’s more light from the fire by the chaise.”

“It would be warmer, too, for you,” Victor notes, and gently gestures for Dorian to move as he wishes, bending over his medical bag when he does. He eyes the berries, one plate disturbed by Dorian’s deliberate plucking of a morsel from it. It is very rare that Victor gets to experience such luxuries as fresh berries - from _Spain_ \- and rarer still to have some offered specifically for him.

He considers.

He resists - with difficulty.

Instead, he turns away to follow Dorian to the chaise, finding a stool nearby to set his bag on, choosing to kneel rather than sit.

“You mentioned invasiveness during the process,” Dorian notes, settling comfortably on the chaise and crossing his legs, hand up to curl his fingers beneath his chin. “Drawing blood is hardly invasive. Though I suppose some would see it as pertaining to witchcraft.”

Victor’s smile is evident this time, dry, almost delighted, and he lifts his eyes to his patient before reaching to adjust one of the lamps so it lights Dorian’s face better. He does not look at him, then. The man is deplorably beautiful in the light.

“Considering their faith based on little more than a book penned by men, I would wonder why they fear science as much as commoners do,” the doctor reasons. “What I do is based in fact, backed up by proof. More than I can say for prayer and exorcism.”

“You are not a man of God?” Dorian asks, smile bright in the lamplight, and Victor snorts softly, pulling the stool closer and reaching into his bag for a stethoscope.

“I am a man of medicine and cold hard facts,” he replies.

"Then we are already at odds," Dorian says with a little laugh. "Shame."

Victor glances towards him - hardly at him, and certainly not veering near his face - and sets the eartips in place. "A man of faith?"

"Near enough. I find that art and music - beauty, in truth - is what moves me most. Though that often straddles the line between the supernatural and the earthly, does it not?"

For an instant, there is no sharp remark, no snort. Nothing but a parting of lips in the nearest thing to surprise that Dorian has seen break the young doctor's stoicism yet. He holds aloft the bell.

"I'll need you to undress."

Dorian's eyes narrow in a shameless pleasure, and he hums a single little note as he sets his fingers to his shirt of deep purple messaline. He watches Victor as closely as Victor avoids watching him, slender fingers working each button loose to bare inch by inch his pale chest.

The shirt comes away and is set aside in graceful disarray at the end of the chaise, before Dorian’s fingers skim over unmarred skin towards the buttons on his pants. Victor takes a sharp breath and shakes his head.

“I just - removing the barrier of fabric allows for a cleaner read on your heart beat, that - you needn’t bare yourself further.”

“Are you sure?”

He pops loose the top button and Victor raises a hand. His laugh hardly sounds like one, more a sound of alarm. “Yes,” he says quickly. “Yes. Please just _sit_.”

Dorian does as asked, watching with fascination the pallor and bloom that at once appear on the young man. Cheeks bloom like roses through a blanket of snow, color draining to focus hot beneath his eyes. It isn’t often that someone so shy makes their way into Dorian’s home. And it’s rarer still that someone so shy has asked him to remove his clothes.

Even if it is just for the sake of medicine.

Spanning his hands against the dark crimson cushion, Dorian straightens his back and widens his shoulders. Tawny eyes track the movement of the metal bell towards his chest, Victor’s eyes still averted ceilingward, and Dorian grins, hissing lightly at the chill of it.

“Other side,” Dorian whispers, delighted as Victor quickly skims the stethoscope above his heart instead.

The blush darkens, and Victor fumbles in his pocket for the watch within, concentrating on the ornate hands moving quick seconds over the face of it. It takes him a minute to connect Dorian’s steady heart beat with the time, and it’s easier, then, to return to his routine.

“Your heart seems healthy,” he says carefully, clicking the watch closed once more and allowing his eyes to skim just quickly over Dorian’s face, for politeness’ sake. “Unsurprising for someone your age. Your class.” Victor swallows, works the bell against his palm for want of something to do with his hands.

Dorian watches him, delight painted clear on his features as the doctor looks anywhere but him for a good few moments. He watches Victor’s throat as he swallows, he watches the way his eyes seek over every detail of every frame behind Dorian.

“Did you imagine an abnormality?” He prompts, and Victor shakes his head, eyes down to his hands once more, stopping the furtive movement against his palm.

“Consumption would not affect your heart, but your lungs. But it is protocol to check everything.”

“Of course.” Dorian smiles, allowing his teeth to skim his bottom lip again before folding the top lip softly over them. Victor swallows.

Again.

“Please turn,” he says gesturing unnecessarily, sitting back on his heels as Dorian draws up a knee and sets it to the chaise, turning his back towards the fire, the doctor seated before it. Rare that he shows his back to someone when so bared, but rather novel. The bell is warmer, this time, when it touches his skin, almost as though the doctor were touching him without a proxy.

“Breathe,” Victor instructs quietly. “As you normally would, please.”

Dorian sets his hands to his thighs and as he draws a breath in, lets his knees spread a little wider. A slow exhale curves his shoulders forward, head turned to watch the doctor’s silhouette from over his shoulder. How one so young has achieved such acclaim - near notoriety - is a remarkable thing, and certainly his temperament with patients isn’t the cause. There is a sweetness to him, though, that tastes of fresh cut cane sugar, untouched by human hands, unpolluted.

Parting his lips with his tongue as if the taste might caramelize against his mouth, Dorian’s smile widens and he faces forward again.

When he inhales, he arches, back bending into an elegant slope that pushes his hips outward, his bottom, spanning his thighs a little wider still.

“As I normally would?” He asks, feigning innocence.

“No talking.”

The words send a cascade of goosebumps across Dorian’s skin despite the warmth of the fire so near them, and he grins, attempting to steady his breathing again.

Victor listens to one side, then the other. The bell presses warm against Dorian's skin and just beside, the curve of Victor's little finger. The sensation is exquisite in its simplicity, in its innocence, and he shivers.

Behind him, Victor takes a breath and Dorian mirrors it.

"Good," he murmurs, eyes up to watch the way Dorian's shoulders bend and stretch back as he sits, tries not to watch the way his body curves beautifully when he turns his head back to look at Victor again. "Your lungs are clear. No wheezing or fluids. Breathe in deep, please, and hold."

Dorian obeys, lips parted and tongue bent within his mouth in an elegant twist, just visible. Victor keeps his eyes on it before raising them to Dorian's.

"Hold," he says softly, a moment more, another, and the doctor licks his lips briefly. "Release."

When Dorian’s breath passes his lips it carries on it a wisp of his voice, so soft that he himself can hardly hear it but he knows - from the twitch of the doctor’s fingers, from the way his own breath catches off-beat - that through his stethoscope, Victor certainly hears it. The doctor inches closer on his knees, and in what Dorian assumes to be his Very Serious Indeed voice, Victor asks him to do it once more.

Dorian does, and this time, Victor’s fingers remain still.

Absence of praise is often more telling than the presence of it.

“How do I fare so far?” Dorian asks, turning to drop back onto the chaise. He leans back on his hands, knees parted, not in any particular come-hither manner - one does not want to overwhelm, after all - but instead a bright young thing, boyish and pleased.

His enthusiasm is entirely genuine, in no way singed around the edges to an acrid burn as most his pleasures are these days. There is a profound relief in a man of science confirming the good health that Dorian knows will not fail him, but the tenuous grip of which keeps him awake and wandering these darkened halls alone too many nights. There is confirmation in this.

There is humanity.

He bites his bottom lip, grinning, and asks, “What’s next, dearest Doctor Frankenstein?”

Victor’s eyes flick quick to Dorian’s and away again, the displeasure at the petname palpable and all the more endearing for it.

“Just doctor,” he says quietly, and Dorian’s smile brightens all the more. 

“Just doctor,” he repeats. Victor nods, just once, and swallows, setting the stethoscope aside.

“Ears,” he says. “Eyes. Looking for any infection or inflammation, any abnormalities. Then your mouth.”

“Do you fear I may have halitosis, doctor?” Dorian asks him, and again, that same small smile as before, barely restrained.

“Do you fear you have a made-up ailment?” He replies.

“Not that one,” Dorian answers, turning his head aside to allow Victor to examine his ear. “And that isn’t made-up.”

“You fear you have other imaginary conditions, then?”

“Something like that.”

Dorian draws a breath, but lets it fall as the doctor brings the otoscope to his ear and his eye to the lens. His fingers are warm against Dorian’s ear, wonderfully firm when he turns his head aside to check the other. When Dorian turns again to face him, they are close enough that noses nearly brush, but for the barrier of the implement held as if it were a talisman.

“My eyes,” Dorian reminds him softly. “And my mouth.”

“Both very clever,” Victor murmurs, just barely enough to hear, clearing his throat as though he could hush away the words he now can’t take back. “Sit forward, please.”

Dorian does, moving forward as Victor moves back, toes set to the ground as he rests back against his heels, poised. He takes up one of the oil lamps to hold up near Dorian’s face.

“Try not to blink,” Victor suggests, and Dorian blinks just to watch his lips purse. To his credit, he does not blink again after. “Look ahead, please. Just past my ear. The light will come near but not harm you.”

He has a steady hand, the young doctor, the lamp barely wavers, and he leans close enough to look at Dorian like few people rarely do - through him entirely. It is clinical, this is not a meeting of eyes that would tug a magnet within someone’s soul to follow Dorian along. Perhaps Victor Frankenstein is built of a stranger metal.

“Do you take any opiates?” The doctor asks, still just as close, though his eyes shift, just enough, for his focus to move to Dorian properly. “Any medications at all?”

Given relief, Dorian blinks wide, lips still unfurled in a languid bloom. Sweet with sherry and Spanish berries, he licks his lower lip between his teeth. His eyes narrow, just a little.

“Those are two different questions,” Dorian says.

“Which is why I asked them as such.”

“But they can be one and the same.”

“Are they?” Victor asks, the snap of his voice drawing Dorian incrementally nearer. “For you.”

“The former,” Dorian says, “from time to time, when it pleases me to do so. But never as the latter. No medications. No need for medicine.”

An incrementally raised brow and the doctor tilts his head. His lips press together and part but he holds back on his commentary, forcing tact forward to smoothe the veneer of professional calm back to his features.

“Open your mouth,” Victor tells him, jaw setting as Dorian slowly parts his lips to obey. With a slow sigh he closes his eyes again. “Wider, please. I need to see your throat.”

“You can hardly do that when your eyes are closed, doctor.”

“Open,” Victor sighs, allowing his eyes to do the same, set deliberately to Dorian’s mouth and his mouth only. “Wider. Please.”

He can hardly manage it for how hard he’s smiling, a little inebriated from the sherry but entirely intoxicated by the shy young man before him. Prickly, yes, and Dorian wouldn’t put it past his dearest doctor to clock him across the jaw on reflex alone if Dorian tried anything too forward. His requirement to see this examination through, however, is a blissful bondage. He cannot leave until he’s done.

Dorian straightens his expression after a bit of a struggle, and presses his tongue between his lips to part them. Unfurling slow, heated to a rosy pink, he lets his jaw slacken and his tongue press conspicuously flat. It is an obeisance, of course.

It is just as much an invitation.

Victor swallows, a thick and audible thing, and forces himself to sit up once more, fingers against Dorian’s jaw to move him towards the light more, so he can see. He smells of sherry and strawberries, and something else. Something entirely Dorian. Victor parts his lips to breathe, the smell distracting.

There is no swelling in Dorian’s throat, no marks of damage or disease. Victor watches him swallow and finds himself mirroring the motion, deliberate and slow. 

“Stay there,” he asks quietly, reaching for his bag again to take out a small bottle, the ethanol pungent as he drips a little onto his hands and sterilizes them, allowing the alcohol to evaporate before turning back to his patient. Carefully, he sets a finger against Dorian’s warm tongue to press it lower, fighting down a shiver at the sensation of it against his hand.

This time, Dorian doesn’t bother to restrain his voice to its faintest tenor. Long lashes shield low across his eyes and from deep inside, carrying through his throat and against the doctor’s finger, he allows nearly a moan. The desire is made clear, and the intent, despite the alcohol burn against his tongue. When he seeks to curl it, Victor pushes firmer, prying Dorian’s mouth wider and skimming his fingertip along the undulations of his tongue.

Helpless, or deeply desiring to seem as such, Dorian leans forward to the edge of the couch and seeks out Victor’s gaze despite how diligently the young man avoids it. He curls his fingernails to his thighs and swallows, throat jerking, just to see the doctor’s blush darken.

Seeming content with his findings - or at least tried to the end of his patience by his patient - Victor withdraws his finger.

Or tries.

Dorian’s lips close softly around the singular digit, replete with noxious rubbing alcohol as it is, and with a damp click of saliva and shadows darkening across his hollowed cheeks, Dorian sucks.

Victor’s eyes widen, enough that the whites are visible, enough that the gasp that pulls from his lungs near-empties them. The sensation is so foreign, so unusual and so terrifyingly welcome that he feels almost scalded.

He jerks back, finger slipping free and hands out behind himself to keep balance as he watches Dorian on the chaise like a thing possessed, or a thing holy. Neither would be logical to him, neither are, and in the most blatant show of unprofessionalism, Victor scrambles to stand.

“Is something wrong?” Dorian licks his lip back into his mouth, brows up, curious. The doctor just shakes his head, brings his hands down to wipe invisible dust from his pants. He clears his throat, runs a hand through his hair, unsettling it into the most fetching disarray.

“No. Nothing. You are, in fact, entirely healthy.”

Dorian tilts his head. “Am I?”

“A fruitless endeavor, as I told Sir Malcolm when he suggested I come here. And now proven. Medically. Scientifically.”

“By you.”

“Who else?” Victor swallows, shakes his head to ward off an answer. He reaches for his bag on the stool and drops it to the floor, cursing softly before bending to retrieve it. “Thank you for your patience. And your time.”

Dorian sits stunned for a moment more as Victor’s footsteps fall fast and hard against the floor. He thinks of sun-sweetened sugar, sucked from the cane. He tastes the scald of alcohol, still hot against his lips.

“Doctor,” Dorian calls out, pushing up from the chaise in pursuit and snaring up the forgotten stethoscope from the floor.

“Which way is it?” Victor asks, standing still in the hallway. He clutches his bag in front of himself with both hands, only unstiffening enough to snatch his stethoscope back when Dorian offers it to him.

“Left.”

“Thank you,” the doctor says, “again.”

“You said you needed to take blood,” Dorian says. He follows, bare-chested and with little mind for it, stopping only when Victor does beside the front door, tugging his coat on so roughly he’s nearly stuck in the sleeve.

“I’ve no reason to think it necessary.”

“And the rest of the exam?”

“You’re in perfect health. The very image of it.”

Dorian sighs, and pushes forth a small smile. “Don’t you want to listen to my heart again?”

Victor raises his chin, eyes on the door, despite it being closed, and tries to catch his breath. His fingers are white against his bag, shoulders tense and straight, pulse humming in his throat. He swallows. Again.

“Good night, Mr. Gray,” he says, reaching for the handle and finding it locked, eyes closing in humiliated resignation as he drops his hand to his side again. Dorian steps near enough to open the door, and with deliberate effort not to look his way, Victor leaves the estate.

\---

It is late, enough so that the fireplace has eased down to hot embers, and most of the berries have been picked from both plates, leaving just the smear of their juice in evidence that they were there at all.

Only then does there come a knock at the door.

When it finally opens, Dorian is hardly the put-together ingenue he was the first time. His hair only straightens when he pushes a hand through it. His lips are stained dark from fruit, his fingertips too. He has not bothered to correct the deliberately slipped button of his trousers, nor any of the rest of his clothing.

His gaze hoods first from near-sleep and the remaining bottle of sherry - one should not waste when there is excess to be enjoyed - but then from a vague suspicion.

“Can I help you, doctor?”

Victor only looks up then, eyes light from beneath dark lashes, before he lifts his chin, a delicate clearing of his throat before he attempts an explanation.

“I have never left an examination unfinished,” he begins, bringing a hand to his lips to rub against them nervously. “It is unprofessional and inappropriate, in any patient’s case, healthy or not, he is entitled to my full services as per my oath. I’m sorry.”

There is a flush to his cheeks, here, but it differs from the innocent embarrassment of hours before. There is something deeper, here, in color and sensation both.

The doctor blinks. “May I intrude upon your hospitality one more time this evening?”

A shiver cuts through Dorian and he blames it on the cold, the ceaseless tiresome snow that not even Spain’s strawberries nor the fleeting sweetness of infatuation can chase away. He steps back to allow Victor in.

The doctor manages a smile as he enters, and in an instant, the ice begins to crack.

“My pleasure,” Dorian says.

Absence of praise is often more telling than the presence of it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"I'm a man of science and medicine," he starts again. "I don't believe in curses or magic or -" A breath, drawn quick and held behind bared teeth and a drawn-back lip. His brows furrow and his words barely find voice but still he speaks. "What did you _do to me_ that I cannot get you out of my head? That I can not concentrate on work or sleep, or anything at all I can't - I -"_

It rains, and then it rains harder. Day by day the filth of London streets grows to something entirely inescapable. Smells and all sorts of filth overflow to the cobblestones and as quickly get washed further down the slums by the rain. Storms that Victor usually looks forward to with childish enthusiasm drive him to toss in his bed, kept from sleep by thoughts and sensations entirely foreign.

Never like his brothers, always a broken little thing, proud of his own uniqueness in that.

And yet.

There is thunder, when he leaves the house, his umbrella laden heavy with thick drops of rain quickly as he seeks for a carriage. He says only the address and then sits back, forcing his eyes closed. His jaw works stiff, planning the speech of displeasure he has rehearsed so often to the cracked ceiling of his one-room little flat.

It is in unhappiness that he comes, surely, it is in distraction and exhaustion, upset and offense.

The carriage bounces and the rain turns to hail, and Victor opens his eyes to watch the lamp sway outside the window, kept from being blown out by the elegant and sturdy glass around it. He counts the divots in it as it turns, imagines he sees shapes within them.

The house looks as imposing in horrific weather as it does in fine, and Victor makes his way to the front door without care for how the rain soaks him and the ice beats him. He needs that anger, he needs that fire within him else his words will falter and he will step back, aside, and allow this slight to pass him by as all others.

Broken little thing.

He knocks, just twice, and setting his umbrella by the door, takes off his hat to fiddle with, fingers freezing where he had forgotten to wear his gloves in his rush.

There is no answer for a time but the rain crackling against the street and the skittering of ice. Then a solid thunk, and the hiss of metal against metal. Another solid thump. Another. A series of locks in neurotic number coming undone one by one, until the door whispers wide and in it, Dorian Gray stands squinting against the light.

A blink.

Another.

His smile blooms across white teeth, genuinely surprised and pleased to be so. Around his shoulders - well, around one of them, the other bared in a curve of pale skin and bone - is little more than a dressing gown. Quilted silk in resplendent peacock paisley, shining blues and greens, and velvet trim resting plush against the curve of his neck. He holds it closed around the waist, and as if entirely too aware of the young doctor’s gaze, slowly brings the adrift sleeve of it back across his shoulder.

“It must be terrible news for you to be here so early,” Dorian remarks, eyes wide and nearly breathless with delight. “You must forgive me for not having dressed for the grim occasion at hand.”

Victor’s lips part, all his planned words strangled in the cradle of his throat. “It’s half-past two.”

“Is it,” Dorian says. His brows raise, and he shakes his head, hair tousling untamed into his face. “I don’t keep clocks. Please, come in? I’ll put on tea. Something somber. The darjeeling is too high-spirited for news such as this, but I have a highly smoked lapsang souchong - you can taste the pine tar upon it. That seems appropriate, does it not?”

"I don't -" Victor's brows furrow and he tries to summon back the anger. But all he can think about is the silken shoulder shown bare to him, the tousled hair, the dressing gown’s velvet trim. "I don’t want to come in,” he manages. 

Dorian looks out into the rain and allows a smile. "The weather is appropriate for such news too, I suppose. Quite a way to set the scene." He crosses his arms over his chest and bites his lip before releasing it. "Did my blood return results of poisoning or sickness? Parasites perhaps? Something more dire?"

Victor stares, watches this man, this boy, beautiful boy, delight in the thought of being unwell. And that makes him angry enough to finally ignite the oil that has been crawling up his throat all week. A boy so spoiled in having known no suffering and no pain, having known nothing at all but the lap of luxury and the luxury of boredom, who would find amusement in dying from illness in his blood.

Victor clenches his hands around his hat harder.

"I'm not here to provide you with entertainment in pain, Mr. Gray,” he says. "Enough people die daily, if you want that amusement go seek it on the streets of the slums. I came - oh goddamn it all." He brings a hand to his face and rubs hard against his lips, over and over. His fingers shake and he hopes Dorian cannot tell. That humiliation Victor doesn't think he could handle.

Not here.

"I'm a man of science and medicine," he starts again. "I don't believe in curses or magic or -" A breath, drawn quick and held behind bared teeth and a drawn-back lip. His brows furrow and his words barely find voice but still he speaks. "What did you _do to me_ that I cannot get you out of my head? That I can not concentrate on work or sleep, or anything at all I can't - I -"

Dorian draws a breath, hardly enough to fill his lungs but even in that gentleness enough to quiet Victor. His lips part in invitation that he knows will be denied; they spread further in apology. But a little smile gathers at the corner of his mouth, and the far corners too of his eyes.

“If you’d eaten any of the fruit, I might make a joke about Hades and Persephone,” he says. His gaze searches across Victor’s though, the soot-grey circles beneath his eyes and the strain carried in every inch of him. “No,” Dorian murmurs, “it would be inappropriate.”

“Tell me,” Victor insists. “Tell me what you’ve done so I might remedy it. Nothing’s working, nothing -”

Dorian’s fingers touch delicate to Victor’s cheek. Like the satin Dorian clutches closer to himself against the damp cold the doctor allows in, they span down along the young man’s jaw to frame his face in an uncalloused palm that has never known a day’s labor. His voice softens to a whisper.

“Not a curse,” he says. “I think it is a far kinder thing than that.”

Victor makes a sound then, a little thing of displeasure and helplessness both and shakes his head, feeling Dorian’s hand press to his face more. It is soft against his wind-cooled cheek, the caress genuine, and it is all Victor can do not to press closer.

It would be unbecoming.

It would be unspeakably rude.

“You drive me to distraction,” he murmurs. “I’m helpless to it, always drawn back. It is a useless feeling, a stupid thing.” He presses his own cold hand against Dorian’s to keep it where it is and sighs slowly out.

“Will you make me go?” He asks quietly.

With a pause only as long as it requires for Dorian to allow those cane-sugar words to absorb, he shakes his head. A little movement first, and then a grander one, as his grin spreads. He closes the distance for them both, standing nearly chest to chest with Victor and watching from so near as the doctor’s lips part in surprise and sweet dismay.

“Of course not,” Dorian tells him, letting his hand skim to Victor’s neck, resting against the starch-stiff collar raised high beneath his chin. “And it isn’t stupid - not at all.”

Their eyes connect.

“It’s the loveliest thing in the world,” he says, sighing a laugh. “Please come in. Please, and quickly. The cold might kill me yet if you have me stand here much longer.”

The doctor blinks, a brief laugh shaking his frame when he realizes that he trembles as much from the cold as the nerves that run rampant within him. He nods, just once, and as Dorian releases him to step back, so he follows.

The door closes and somehow it doesn’t feel final, it doesn’t feel like a trap or a cage.

Victor allows his hat to be taken from his hands, unwinds his scarf and sets his coat on the rack as the first time. He feels garishly overdressed, in his pressed shirt and vest, his shoes that he had actually bothered to clean, now smeared through with mud and mess. Before him, Dorian stands nearly entirely bare, the shoulder of his robe slipping down flawless skin once more.

“I hope I did not interrupt,” the doctor murmurs, hands fidgeting together before him, then behind him so they’re out of the way. “I should have called ahead, or written -”

Dorian’s toes sink into the carpet runner, languid strides carrying him backward for a moment more until finally, biting his lip in a grin, he turns down the darkened hall.

“You can write me after,” he suggests.

“After -”

“After,” agrees Dorian. “And only if you like. You needn’t apologize for interrupting. I’d overslept and the day was getting away from me, anyway.”

“I didn’t apologize,” the doctor says, matter-of-fact.

Dorian stops and turns to him with a grin, thrusting out a hand to swing wide the towering door to a sitting room. Another sitting room. It is as dark as the rest of the house, though there are expansive windows, the dense winter curtains pulled shut on their runners. Indeed, there are no clocks.

Nor, for that matter, does there appear to be anyone else here at all.

Victor follows him, slow steps, deliberately quiet on the parquet, hands still behind himself in as close to a semblance of put-together that he can get. His heart is speeding, his cheeks warm, now, as much from the temperature of the room as with the realization that he had come here with the intention to argue, to loudly proclaim his displeasure, and he is now inside, following the soft click of Dorian’s bare feet against the floor.

He doesn’t know what he wants.

He knows perfectly well what he wants.

Victor swallows and regards this sitting room, if only to give himself something to look at that isn’t Dorian, beautiful half-bare Dorian.

There is no service for a late breakfast or for tea; only a single blanket is out of place, strewn across a long couch. There is nothing with which Dorian might distract himself to take the strain of attention off the doctor. He folds his hands behind himself. In front. He gathers them in the velvet trim of his gown and holds it close, arms folded.

“Will you come closer?” He asks, and it is not the cold responsible for the shiver that ripples through him when Victor takes a step nearer. And then another. At arm’s length he stops, and Dorian mirrors his wary movements.

Still he does not touch or grab, though every fiber in his body is suddenly alight for it. Nothing that would send his dearest doctor fleeing again, nothing that would make him so angry as to have earned such a solemn attire and furrowed brow. That’s all eased now, into a savory uncertainty that suits him far better than ire.

Dorian leans just enough that his words unfurl warmth across Victor’s cheek.

“Would it perhaps be of benefit to know,” he asks, “that I have only slept thanks to thoughts of you, and my hand between my legs?”

Victor’s breath gasps in and he holds it, brows up and lips parted. His body feels alight with every form of sensation he can imagine, without being touched at all, his mind runs rampant with images the words so clearly bring forth. He knows he’s blushing, he knows there is nothing he can do to cool such an involuntary response.

He does not admit to Dorian the same, though he is fairly sure he already knows.

So close, his eyes are almost green, lips plush and parted over even white teeth, lashes long, almost too long for a boy. Victor swallows and finally releases the breath he has held, pulling his own lip between his teeth and wishing, desperately, that it was Dorian’s instead.

“I’ve thought -” It doesn’t matter. Victor knows it doesn’t matter, and he allows a weak little laugh to escape him. Dorian steps closer and Victor doesn’t step back. Warmth seems to radiate from the man, sleepy and human, welcoming. He smells like poppies and sweet cream and clean sweat and Victor’s entire body shivers at the thought of all those elements mingled.

“I hoped," he amends, whispering.

“Sometimes,” Dorian whispers, “that’s all the faith one needs for magic.”

Dorian’s lips are soft as spring’s first rose petals as they brush across his cheek. It is too soft to call a kiss, but what other word could come near? When Victor breathes out this time it is with relief carried on his sigh, which chokes short on another near-laugh when Dorian grasps his wrists and sets the doctor’s hands to his shoulders.

Another whisper of contact sweeps like silk against the corner of his mouth.

“I’m going to kiss you, Doctor Frankenstein,” murmurs Dorian, a smile in his eyes.

And he does, sweet as ripe fruit and just as firm. They sink together, lungs emptying all at once against the other’s cheek in a hiss. With abandon, Dorian slips his arms over Victor’s shoulders and leans the entirety of his skinny weight against him.

Victor's fingers tighten, flex, relax. His lips push against Dorian's and he knows he should do something. Part them. Sigh. Say something clever. But his wits seem to be failing him along with his tact and manners and all he can do is make a small sound and close his eyes to this.

There have been kisses, sweet things against his cheeks, but this is fire. A brand. This kiss he will remember. And when he pulls back with a sigh to draw a breath, he finds Dorian stays close and parts his lips as well.

And kisses him again.

Dorian’s hands coil languid over Victor’s shoulders while the doctor’s remain almost stiff between them, elbows against Dorian's chest as though to hold him back. With that realization, Victor moves them. Slowly at first, carefully, hands sliding cool down the silk of the robe Dorian still wears until they press closer and Victor hopes he never has to breathe again.

In his arms, Dorian comes alive. His sleeves slip high around his elbows as he twines slender arms around Victor’s neck; his body moves in a sinuous curve that brings them so tightly together that no light could pass between. Between every smoldering kiss is a breath, stoking the flame between them hotter.

Victor turns his head and nuzzles Dorian’s cheek, and the sound of his sigh brings back the memory of listening to his lungs, strong and smooth. He brings trembling hands down to the small of Dorian’s back where he arched on the exhale. There is more to this beautiful boy than his fey and genteel appearance, than his class or his station. Victor can feel Dorian’s muscles, a sleek strength within him.

“May I?”

Dorian’s voice is so close, touched with a caress of warm lips against his ear. His fingers rest upon the doctor’s black string tie, one curving beneath the loose-looped knot to slowly work it free. Eyes dancing as if privy to a secret joke, Dorian leans back enough to touch a kiss to the little dimple in Victor’s chin.

The doctor grins, bright and surprised and nods, fearing his voice would crack should he try to use it. This is overwhelming in the best possible way. He had expected, perhaps, laughter, not the cruel kind but amused nonetheless. He had expected, perhaps, a gentle let down and the closing of a door. He had hoped, oh he had hoped, for a brush of his hand. A brush of his lips.

He had hoped, _oh_.

He sighs slow as Dorian works the the tie free, slides it away. He swallows when elegant fingers come to work the buttons on his vest and open it up, sliding it from his shoulders and letting it fall to the floor with a crooked, mischievous smirk. His heart hammers as Dorian’s fingers come to work the buttons of his shirt.

Carefully, Victor sets his fingers to the sash holding the loose robe to Dorian’s frame, but he does not yet pull it free. He watches him, instead.

Oh, how Dorian loves to be watched.

Not only watched, but seen and heard, tasted and touched. What extraordinary confirmation of his existence comes in the furtive mouths and hands that press against him, the spill of blood or semen near-steaming against flushed skin. How alive he feels, however briefly, to be known as something other than what he truly is.

Something beautiful.

He does not ask if Victor has done this before, with men or with anyone. Dorian knows the answer well enough already from the tremors that span into shivers each time that Dorian’s fingertips touch Victor’s skin. Each time he presses their mouths together, well-fitted and warm. Each time a button slips loose, until with his hands curling to fists in the fabric, Dorian frees Victor’s shirt from his trousers and guides this too back from his shoulders.

Careful to keep from startling the gunshy doctor off again, Dorian brings a hand slowly back across Victor’s shoulder before spanning it over his chest. Pale as bone china, but far from fragile, he stands stock still and rigid as elegant fingers stroke through fine chest hair, soft as down feathers. He spreads a kiss against Victor’s bare shoulder as if it might ease his tension.

“Will you bare me, too?”

The doctor blinks, watching Dorian’s smile, allowing his own to appear despite how much he suddenly wants to cover himself and go. He is not embarrassed of his form, he hardly has reason to be, it is fit enough, but he is embarrassed with how tense it stands, how rigidly he holds his posture, when against him Dorian shifts like water in a soothing ebb and flow. He is liquid, languid, feline and perfect.

Parting his lips with his tongue, Victor grasps harder at the sash and pulls it towards himself, letting it fall and slip free. The robe opens to reveal the same soft chest that has haunted - entirely welcome - Victor’s dreams, the same taut stomach and slim hips, the same heavy cock he had held gently in his hand as he forced himself to complete the medical examination days - was it only days? - before.

Now it stands more erect, larger, darker, and Victor can do little more than draw a breath and bring his hand up to curl around Dorian’s neck softly, holding him near. He swallows, just once, and this time kisses him first.

Their tongues twist together, lips sliding smooth to spread and join, part and crush together again. Dorian bends beneath his dearest doctor, leaning back enough that Victor’s free hand moves quick to the small of Dorian’s back to support them both. A grin finds the young doctor’s bottom lip held between Dorian’s teeth, and his nose wrinkles in delight before he sucks warmly and sinks into another kiss.

He curls his fingernails down Victor’s stomach to shiver his muscles to quivering tension, and sets to unbuttoning his trousers. Dorian makes quick work of them but not before Victor’s palm slips lower, fingers seeking, until exploratory and curious, he squeezes Dorian’s plush backside and pulls him closer. He can’t help but laugh, mouth parted warm over Victor’s pulse, until his trousers are freed and pushed to the floor.

Or at least his thighs.

They are quite snug.

With an easy kiss, Dorian breaks away, nuzzling fierce to Victor’s chest. Laving his tongue across a peaking nipple, over the rapid rain-patter of his heart, lower Dorian sinks, lower, biting firm stomach until finally he reaches the trapped trousers and his knees.

Victor can do little more than watch, trapped as he is by his own trappings - he supposes this is where the word came from - as elegant fingers work his pants lower, unlace his boots and pull them off and away. His pants are peeled down, his underwear following, and then Victor does make a sound, a little thing of warning, concern for this being a discomfort, an imposition.

When Dorian looks up he knows it is anything but that.

He seeks a hand down to slip through silky straight hair and watches Dorian arch his shoulders, turn his head. He is fluid, entirely alive, and when he parts his lips to playfully suck Victor’s thumb into his mouth the doctor finds he cannot control the moan that escapes him.

“Did you think of this?” Dorian teases softly, rubbing his lips against the damp pad of Victor’s thumb to work his lips slick. “Imagine it?”

“I did not think I would get past the door,” Victor admits.

Dorian laughs, bright, and teases the tip of his tongue against Victor’s thumb before leaning instead towards his body. One hand wrapping around soft-furred thighs, lips parting against the coarse curls that spread dark around the base of his cock, Dorian lets his laugh spill hot against that sensitive skin. He gently grasps Victor’s cock with the other hand, and brings it near his cheek.

“You were very angry with me,” Dorian reminds him. “Did you come over only to tell me off?”

“That was the intent.”

“And now?” Dorian asks, lips parted against the doctor’s hard shaft, flushed so full the veins stand out stark. He teases a languid kiss, tongue stroking between his lips, moving across velvety foreskin, seeking higher, pausing only to ask Victor again:

“And how about now, doctor?”

Victor can only manage a curse, quiet and breathless, and moves his eyes up to the ceiling once more. He is flushed and cautious, at once wanting to look and knowing that he cannot, that his body is incapable of such endurances yet, when it has never been subjected to them before. He moans softly as Dorian sucks kisses against taut skin. They should not, he should not. 

And yet.

“Now I fear my words would desert me if I tried,” he breathes, eyes closing and throat working before he parts his lips and allows himself to look. “And I fear I would not have the strength to scold you into stopping.”

He meets wide tawny eyes, ringed in dark lashes that hood low as Dorian curls his lips around the head of Victor’s cock and sucks. His cheeks hollow and his throat clicks, soft hands spreading over the doctor’s hips as Dorian holds him in his sway through his mouth alone. A hum resonates and builds, reverberating up through Victor until the sensation emerges in him as a moan.

His cock is enough to fill Dorian’s mouth, but not to overpower it. So stiff that Dorian imagines it must be painful, every thump of the doctor’s quickening pulse seems to strike against his tongue, faster still when Dorian swallows against the swelling clear slick that spreads salt-thick and musky through his mouth. The sounds Victor makes - aborted attempts to protest, incomplete endeavors to praise - tighten in Dorian’s groin in turn.

He thinks of the moment that Victor heard his heart beat, and called it strong.

Healthy.

 _Alive_.

The last was unspoken but Dorian heard it clear as day, and he pulls loose of Victor’s cock, unminding the threads of spit that streak shining against his chin. Dorian stands and pulls his doctor against him, to let him feel his heart again. Hands frame Dorian’s face, perpetually smooth, perpetually young, and Victor holds him close, forgetting for a moment his humiliation at being so hard so quickly, at being so bared by the most beautiful man alive, to be touched and seen by him. He holds him close and smiles at how slow Dorian’s heart beats compared to his own, not allowed to speed, perhaps, or too used to this to necessitate it.

“Might I request -”

“So polite,” Dorian laughs, his own hands seeking over warm skin and firm muscle, understated but certainly felt.

“Can we -”

“Better.” A grin, nothing more, and Victor rocks his hips up against the man before him, holding him close, palms sliding down to frame strong thighs, feeling the muscles shift as Dorian pushes himself up on his tiptoes for no other reason than to curl, delighted, against his doctor.

“Bed?” Victor finally manages.

Dorian steals a kiss, and then another, chasing Victor’s tender lips with his teeth and a grin.

“It will be as though you hadn’t come calling at all,” Dorian tells him. “Since you were already there with me in spirit.”

His very serious doctor manages a startled little smile at this, and Dorian can’t help but wonder how one so acutely somber can be so entirely unaware of his own inherent charm. He clasps their fingers together and squeezes, leaving in their wake a minor cataclysm of clothing as he leads his doctor towards the stairs and up.

The house is indeed expansive, intended for generations to occupy. Perhaps they once did. But there is far more now that seems untended, thin layers of dust along the ornate gilded edges of picture frames, whole rooms in passing wherein the narrow illumination through drawn curtains highlights strange shapes beneath sheets. Victor is certain, as they reach the landing overlooking the foyer and carry on towards the master bedroom, that there is no one here but Dorian.

He seems almost like a ghost in his own space, pale and perfect amidst the dust and drapery of years and years. Decades, Victor would wager. He follows because he is gently held and led, he follows because even if Dorian were to let his hand go, he would still move after him.

He finds that the closer they get to the bedchamber, and once within it, the quicker his mind associates his pleasure with what it means to be here, what it means to be here with _him_. He tugs against their joined hands and when Dorian turns, he holds him with a new-found determination, a new-found strength and giddiness.

He kisses Dorian until they are breathless, parts long enough to gasp a breath before snaring hands in his hair and pulling him close again.

Dorian revels in the swift-moving river that rushes beneath ice. With every kiss, it cracks, revealing rapids and eddies, depths that even Dorian could not have predicted. He knows not what resides within his doctor, nor indeed much of anything about him, but it hardly seems to matter when he gathers Victor’s fingers to his chest and holds them over his heart.

“Like a little bird,” he whispers, laughing, “fluttering desperate for the spring it sees blooming beyond its cage.”

Victor grins, and then he kisses him again, fingers spreading over the quickfire heartbeat beneath them, tickling sensitive smooth skin until he moves them over a peaked little nipple and Dorian shivers. Eyes closed and lips together still and a blush, finally, shading definition to Dorian’s beautiful features.

Victor curls his hand around Dorian’s side, over his ribs, and touches a thumb to his nipple instead, drawing the same shuddering vibration of pleasure from him. He is helpless to it, losing in an instant all decorum and restraint. Rubbing his cheek against Victor’s shoulder, Dorian holds to his arms and moans, knees shaking, when Victor strokes again.

“Don’t stop,” Dorian pleads, cheeks hot as hearthstones reflecting richly red.

“You’re going to collapse,” laughs Victor.

“Then let me, but don’t stop.”

His grin falters, turns crooked, splits into a laugh and then another high, aching whimper. He seeks out Victor’s other hand and guides it against his cock so he can feel it twitch, as again his doctor teases his thumbnail across Dorian’s pebbled nipple.

It becomes a test of patience, then, Dorian trembling against Victor, Victor’s hand soft against his cock until it isn’t, until he grasps Dorian properly and strokes, finding those little mewls of pleasure simply increase in volume, in depth, against him. It is an interesting sensation, pleasuring in reverse, his hand curled over Dorian, not himself. Victor stumbles back, one step, another, and when he sits on the bed, Dorian wastes no time pressing his shoulders down to it and crawling to lay over him entirely.

They work in shoves and wriggling, wet kisses and little sounds as their cocks rub together and their sweat mingles and any doubts Victor had in his mind dissipate and flutter like moths around a light.

And then that coil, that cooling of skin and heating of blood and Victor catches Dorian’s hand where it strokes him and holds him at bay, cheeks scarlet as he shakes his head, eyes bright, pupil-wide and imploring.

Not so soon.

Not this humiliation between them, not now.

Dorian lays heavier across his doctor, slow thrusts driving his cock against the soft skin at the join of Victor’s thigh to his groin. He waits until Victor’s grip eases just enough and then strokes him again, kissing away the curse that spills forth hissing.

“Please,” Dorian asks, as gentle and as genuine as he’s asked for everything else this evening - no, afternoon - between them. Their eyes meet, Victor’s wide with dismay, Dorian’s soft around the edges. “We can do it again,” he promises with a lilting little laugh. “If you stay.”

Victor groans, the thought alone enough to make his entire body stretch taut, that he could stay, that Dorian would like him to stay, that this, what they explore now, could happen again. Would. Should, between them.

He swallows all immediate excuses regarding how he normally does not lose himself to pleasure so quickly, how only recently he had found himself biting the pillow and whimpering into it with thoughts of Dorian splayed bare - as he is now - in his mind. They don’t matter, because Dorian’s pulse tastes sweet against Victor’s tongue when he sucks against alabaster skin and holds there, they don’t matter because he is being whispered to in myriad languages, some he knows and others entirely foreign, they don’t matter because when Victor comes, hard enough that sparks flicker white behind his closed eyelids, Dorian moans against him and follows him over.

Like schoolboys discovering the grand excesses of which their bodies are capable, like men of science and the arts who know the laws against these things to be untenable. Like poets and scientists and French philosophers and Greek soldiers who came before them, for a moment they are are joined in their tandem masculinity made tender. Dorian kisses Victor as the ribbons of wet white heat spread between their bellies.

It is an agreement, without needing words, that his dearest doctor will stay.

It is an acknowledgement, expressed physically, that Dorian wants him desperately to do so.

“Perhaps,” Dorian whispers, slipping to lay against Victor’s side. “Perhaps I will reserve the lapsang souchong. The darjeeling seems suddenly more appropriate.”

The doctor’s lips work, then purse together, then finally split into a wide smile with a huffed breath between them. He brings a hand to cover his face and sighs when Dorian draws it away, curled like a cat beside him, hair a mess and eyes dark where they look over his folded arm.

“I confess,” Victor murmurs, “that I am rather poorly versed in the language and meaning of tea.”

“Terrible,” Dorian responds, voice muffled by his hand but his smile bright around his eyes. “I suppose I shall have to educate you.”

“Shall you?”

“Quite.”

Victor swallows, licks his lips open and turns his head to the beautiful man in his bed. “I suppose you shall,” he tells him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Extraordinary,” the doctor breathes, leaning closer to kiss the soft skin of Dorian’s stomach, feeling his pulse there, where the skin is thin. Could he die from a wound there? From a wound anywhere? From disease or disuse? Starvation or cold? It is enough to pull Victor entirely out of poetry. He wants to work, and study and never sleep again._
> 
> _He wants to understand._

Victor claims he wakes first. Dorian claims he never sleeps.

In truth, neither of them are lying, but the bickering that pulls them from sleepy nuzzling, at whatever time of the day they seem prime for waking, is a new-found novelty and entertainment between them.

It has been several weeks, though neither keep count. Several weeks of 'accidental' visits, and 'I was just in the neighbourhood' excuses that never fly. Neither care. Neither call the other out on it to relish in their own little self-soothing motions of attempted status quo ante. But Victor spends the night now, more often than not, and Dorian actually makes an effort to have food readily available to them both.

Slowly, they learn each other and their patterns. Slowly, it becomes a routine.

"What are you reading?" Dorian will mumble, walking his fingers down Victor's ribs.

"A book of poetry," Victor will reply.

Today, Victor isn't reading in English, and Dorian is delighted.

"Who?" He asks, skimming fingertips over the spot he knows makes Victor squirm in warm pleasure. Just against his lowest rib, where it rounds toward his spine.

Victor balances the book against his sternum and with a hand so freed, swats at Dorian's prying fingers. They are set to his lips instead, well-kissed though still so very serious in the thin line they draw. Dorian traces the bowed shape of them and watches as they part for him.

“Verlaine,” Victor answers, catching his lips around Dorian’s finger in a soft, suckling kiss. “ _Romances sans paroles_. Do you know it?”

“I know him. Well, I did when he was here that summer with Arthur,” Dorian says. He tucks his body closer to his doctor, cheek against his shoulder and long body fitted flush against Victor’s side. “That was before he went and shot him, the poor thing. Only nicked his wrist but that’s all an eighteen year-old poet needs to spend the rest of their days in grim navel-gazing, I suppose.”

Victor blinks. “You knew them?”

“Only for a summer. Ten years ago now,” Dorian wonders, brows drawing inward. “Longer.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Better not to,” Dorian sighs, expression smoothing. “They’d call themselves ‘tempestuous’ or a thousand other florid words. Mostly miserable to my eyes, but damned if I’ve ever seen a pair more cataclysmically in love. Like a ship’s slow sinking and both too stubborn to attempt swimming to safety, instead just daring the other to move first. It seems a bit surreal, though, doesn’t it?”

“Them?”

“The poetry,” laughs Dorian, fanning his fingers through the cottony tufts of hair on Victor’s chest. “I wouldn’t have guessed it for you.”

“Well we won’t be getting any more Coleridge or Blake, will we,” Victor reasons, mildly affronted. He always is, a little, over damn near everything and Dorian pays his bristling no mind at all beyond a passing charm. Victor’s words, however, shadow Dorian’s eyes, and he tucks his head beneath Victor’s chin.

“No,” he agrees. “I suppose we won’t.”

The ease of morning’s waking and the pleasant surprise of finding the other still there withers. An inner strain snares like thorny vines around Dorian’s heart, twining through his ribs so tightly he wonders if they won’t finally snap from it. Despite the weeks of intentionally unintentional time together, despite the eager rutting against the other’s hands that tires them into tangled sleep, they have spoken very little of themselves and only rarely of the other. Certain rooms are open to them, welcoming and bright, but within Dorian are vast hallways and countless chambers, shuttered to the illumination of thought but for the occasional candle-lit glimmer of memory that comes and goes, trailing shadows in its wake.

His throat clicks as he swallows. Who among their curious peers does not harbor strangeness within them? Who else among the city’s unwitting denizens could perhaps, potentially, be the first to understand?

Dorian throws a curtain wide, eyes closing as he murmurs.

“I knew Coleridge, too.”

A snort then, gentle enough that it isn’t derisive, and the doctor looks up from the text. His eyes remain oddly red-rimmed, despite the sleep he has caught up on, despite the warmth he now feels - for the first time - in the arms of someone else who genuinely wants him there. It gives him an expression of perpetual upset, or surprised displeasure.

“I suppose all scholars claim to know their subject,” Victor replies. “We all claim to know the poet through their poetry, or the scientist through their theories. The old adage about putting so much of yourself into your work that it becomes an immortal part of you, encased forever in words and leather bindings.”

Dorian raises his eyes, taking in his doctor’s stoic certainty. Among his erudite pretensions - for in his words are both - one word in particular tugs Dorian’s heart a little harder, a little faster against his ribs. A cloth across a bird’s cage will quiet it to sleep, consuming darkness akin to that of night. He too could allow this to pass, a rare moment of openness let to fade.

Or he could open the cage, for the first time in decades upon decades, freedom as much a possibility as the likelihood of cold contact against an unreceptive wall.

The fluttering of wings wavers in his voice and tangles in his throat.

“I knew him as an acquaintance,” Dorian whispers. “Many years ago.”

The doctor frowns and turns back to his book, fingers careful against it. Long fingers, meant for a surgeon, or a musician. Perpetually dirty yet somehow always gentle.

“He passed before I was born, and you cannot be much older,” Victor points out, turning a page deliberately as he considers the earnestness of the words, as he feels Dorian watch him so intensely it sparks fire along his skin. He swallows and looks at him again, meets the eyes that widen in their imploring.

For the first time since Victor has known the notorious Dorian Gray, he sees him frightened.

“How could you have?” Victor asks him gently. “When he did not exist within our realm of existence?”

Dorian’s mouth curves to suggest a smile that does not reach his eyes. The unusual sensation of panic - a rare lack of control - rattles through him like a steam engine. He can blame it on the medicines the doctor takes, evidenced by the unhealing marks in his arm. He disregard any claims that Victor makes as the ravings of a madman, should he flee and speak of this to anyone else.

He could do worse than that.

Dorian swallows down the thought, throat working stiff. His brow creases.

“He did, though,” Dorian answers. “A span of my -” Lifetime? No, that is entirely the wrong word. “- existence overlapped with his, all too brief. He and the others, they all died young.”

“The others.”

“Percy and George and John,” he says, a smile flickering to life and fading. “Elizabeth outlasted the lot of them. You would know them by their surnames, I think - Shelley, Byron, Keats, Browning.” He lifts a hand and dismisses the words, soft as one clears a moth from coming too near a flame, and with the selfsame knowledge that it will return until immolated. “If you asked how long I’ve been in this house, I couldn’t tell you,” he says. “It would not be hyperbole to say so.”

And there, that look, the look of dubious disbelief, as though one has smelled something displeasing and is working hard to mask their response. That look Dorian knows well, finds more often than not he can push it away to nothing at all, but this tastes like ash in his mouth, seeing it on his doctor.

For a long moment Victor remains silent, book still open against a drawn-up knee. And then he closes it, a deliberate motion, and sets his palms atop the cover. He is incredibly still, almost like an animal in the forest fearing a sound, and when he blinks his tongue parts his lips with a little click of damp skin.

“You lived long enough to have met them?”

Dorian swallows. “And longer still than that.”

Victor doesn’t nod, he doesn’t shake his head, he doesn’t appear perturbed at all. He just remains still. So, so still. Dorian wonders if he’s breathing. He thinks of the little songbirds he sometimes finds outside the house, their heads turned backwards on broken necks and their imprint laid dusty upon a windowpane.

“A poor joke,” Dorian says, brushing a kiss against Victor’s shoulder as he draws himself up in bed and slips a foot to the chilly floor. “Forgive me. I shouldn’t have interrupted your reading. I’ve no idea the time of day but we’ll pretend it’s still morning. I’ll put the coffee on for you, and I purchased rashers of back bacon when last I was out, to fry up with eggs.”

Only then does Victor reach out to touch him, hand against Dorian’s own, pressing it gently to the bed so he doesn’t get up fully from it.

“You’re not lying,” Victor murmurs, looking for a moment where their hands join, easing up the push a little when Dorian turns his enough to curl his fingers up over Victor’s hand. “You are - you know this to be true. It is improbable,” he says quietly, shaking his head, and lifts his eyes to Dorian’s when the other makes to move again, like a trapped animal. “It is miraculous.”

Victor’s lips spread into a grin for a moment before he eases the expression to something softer, shifts closer and lets his book fall unminded on the bed behind him.

“You are miraculous.”

Dorian watches in disbelief as his doctor comes near enough to nuzzle his hip. Lips part and close against it, physical acceptance mirroring that in his words. Slowly, Dorian loosens back onto the bed, though still perched near enough the bed to bolt.

Fear is an uncommon enough sensation that Dorian allows it to flood him a moment more, before warm relief takes its place.

"Not the word that I would choose for it," he murmurs, squeezing their fingers together. He frees them only to set his hand instead to Victor's head and curl his nails softly against his scalp. "Acceptance is a far more unlikely thing."

"It was nearly sixty years ago that they were writing," Victor says. There is a brightness in his eyes that transfixes Dorian as he watches it take light. "Eighty years, then? A hundred?"

Dorian allows a smile, strangely gentle. "More. Twice that, perhaps. One finds that measurements of time become maddening, I'm afraid. I've lost count. Better to recall people and moments that transgress the limitations of years than adhere to something so relatively meaningless."

“Extraordinary,” the doctor breathes, leaning closer to kiss the soft skin of Dorian’s stomach, feeling his pulse there, where the skin is thin. Could he die from a wound there? From a wound anywhere? From disease or disuse? Starvation or cold? It is enough to pull Victor entirely out of poetry. He wants to work, and study and never sleep again.

He wants to understand.

And he wants, he knows, to remain close, to feel this life pulse through Dorian, warm, as it does not through Victor’s own creations. He is alive, here, he is not merely a facsimile of such. And he is beautiful.

“Tell me,” Victor sighs, moving to rest against Dorian’s chest, watching him with a smile. “Tell me of your favourite times. Break my misconceptions of history and the people it houses.”

Dorian sighs, eyes towards the pressed tin flowers high overhead. His smile lingers, though, gathered in the corners of his eyes, the fine lines deepening when Victor touches a kiss to his chest again.

“I spent time in the country with them,” he says. “Wordsworth was an absolute bore, in bed by sundown and awake before it came up again, chiding all the others on being layabouts. Sam was a delight until he got too thick with smoke to do anything but scrawl down whatever he was seeing. Once he’d tied one on, John and I would go down to the lake at dusk and swim naked.”

“John Keats,” Victor whispers, nearly laughing. Dorian makes an agreeable sound, and threads his fingers through his doctor’s hair again.

“He was an extraordinary beauty, spilling poetry with every breath. This was before he met Isabella - his _muse_ ,” Dorian snorts. “She lays claim to ‘Bright Star’, though Fanny’d have pulled her curls out by the roots for saying so. It doesn’t matter now. He wrote ‘Grecian Urn’ for me and that’s the better one anyway.” He draws a deep breath and holds it until his lungs hurt, releasing it slow and turning to his side to nuzzle Victor’s cheek.

“He wrote once to a friend of ours that he had a habitual feeling of his life having past, and that he was leading a posthumous existence. I suppose it’s redundant to say that he had a way with words, isn’t it.”

Victor watches him, a coolness coiling in his stomach that he can barely explain away. He is listening to stories of men he has idolized, read their words and related to them, but now they are brought to life in a way Victor has never thought of them before: human. People with lives and mistakes, laughter and recollections, worries and woes. Things that had come across on paper, through their extraordinary words, but things that Victor had never associated with the people behind them.

He wonders how strange it must be for Dorian to read their works, now, having been there when they wrote them.

There is such a feeling of nostalgia there, for a place that never existed, for a time he never lived in. But the beating heart beneath him had, it had beaten just as steadily then as it does now beneath Victor’s hand.

Scientifically, he should not believe this. It is illogical and unnatural and yet… day after day, storm after storm, Victor seeks to create life from the no longer living, seeks to perfect it in a way he has yet to find. It consumes him.

It consumed him. Before Dorian Gray.

“A way with words and with life it seems,” Victor says, turning to rest comfortably against Dorian, noses soft against each other, eyes barely open. “What a life you’ve led. London must be dreadful for you.”

Dorian notes the past tense, but doesn’t dispute it. It seems more appropriate than the alternative. He curls a hand against Victor’s cheek and touches their lips together, softly first, and then firmer.

“It’s home,” he says, lips tilting together, tugging down at one corner. “It’s where I belong.”

Twining a leg across Victor’s, Dorian slides flush against him, hips to hips, chest to chest. This eases the shadow away from his features again, helped further by the way his doctor’s mouth fits just so against his pulse.

“Besides,” he grins, “it’s remarkable to see how the city has changed, and those who live in it - some adapting for the better, some for the worse. You’d never believe this used to be a country house with all the factories belching coal around it.”

“And,” Dorian adds, rocking their bodies together, a tangle of linen limbs smooth as ivory. “I’ve met you, haven’t I?”

“I’m terribly dreary,” the doctor laughs, lifting his eyes to Dorian again, smiling when he tugs his hair a little. “Cooped up in my flat unless I come here, with my poetry and dust and electricity. Blood and viscera is almost a treat by this point, I am rather an awful companion.”

There is such pleasure in his words, for knowing that while Dorian is well aware of every single one of these shortcomings, he still welcomes Victor to his home and to his bed. It is pleasant, surprising, frightening for them both - they feel like children.

“Genius manifests under clouds of dust and sparks of new technology,” Dorian points out, slipping his hand down to cup Victor’s cheek as he continues to rock up against him, draws up a leg to slip between Victor’s own, feeling him grow harder from the motion and gentle friction. “Genius never believes itself to be. Those that do, go mad.”

“Am I not mad?”

“Are you?”

Victor just smiles, unsure he can answer, yet, with so many secrets unfurled in their bed already. Tomorrow perhaps, or the day after. He will tell him. For now, he ducks his head and ghosts his lips over a dark nipple.

When Dorian laughs, it’s sweet as birdsong. The freedom in his confession is resplendent, so bright it nearly hurts to consider. He shivers down to tightly curling toes as Victor suckles the stiffening nub, tongue teasing between his lips. For his inexperience, Victor is a miraculous lover, quick to learn and eager to seek that knowledge, devouring it ravenous from Dorian’s mouth and hands. Accustomed to those who excel in the physical arts, the virginal sweetness of his doctor is intoxicating.

It nearly feels as though Dorian, too, is learning for the first time again.

He dares his hands downward, following the harsh curves and delicate skin of his doctor’s body. Victor warms beneath his touch, his icy exterior melting into wonderful pliancy. Curling his fingers around Victor’s bottom, Dorian presses their groins together and then slowly spreads his plush cheeks to tease a finger between them.

The touch of Victor’s teeth around his nipple nearly undoes him, however, and Dorian laughs, helpless.

“This will be over far too quickly,” he warns, “and there is so much I wish to do with you.”

Another deliberate lick and Victor relents, kissing warm to Dorian’s chest instead, following the guidance of rocking down against his lover, allowing himself to be spread, despite the blush it pulls to his cheeks. He hardly has to tell Dorian that this is entirely new to him, heard of, certainly, but never indulged in, never even considered beyond the clinical functionality of it for those with such a preference.

Dorian is his preference. It would be denying every instinct and response of his body to say otherwise.

“What do you want to do with me?” Victor asks him, eyes up through the messy fringe to regard him, narrowed with a smile. He has grown used to seeing Dorian in the half-twilight of his home, curtains always drawn and heavy here. He is beautiful in every light.

Their kiss is immolation, searing hot and crackling fierce between them. Dorian does not draw away even to moan, the sound trapped between the rough collision of their lips and sweep of soft tongues stroking firm together. He rubs again, a slow circle around wrinkled, delicate skin, and shoves their bodies together enough that Victor is on his back and Dorian lays heavy atop him. They are matched in the capabilities of their bodies, though not the manner - whereas Dorian is lithe and quick, Victor has in him a pronounced strength that sends Dorian’s blood into a scalding blush through his cheeks when Victor’s hands find his throat and wrap tenderly.

“Will you let me inside you?” He asks, seeking another kiss and grinning when he is denied.

He kisses over his jaw instead, over his neck and to the hammering pulse as Victor raises his eyes to the wall behind the bed and deliberately watches it as his face floods with color. He is hard against Dorian, as Dorian is against him, but it is one thing to give and take pleasure through hands and whispered words and quite another to join in such a way.

Victor could care little for sin, he hardly has a God to answer to. He works in the dynamics of science and concepts of what the human body can take and enjoy.

It will hurt, he knows, and the thought alone is thrilling.

“Will you be kind?”

Dorian smiles at this, but he does not laugh. He would not risk it being mistaken when Victor has proven to be so sensitive; he would not risk making mockery of such a genuine question.

“Have you ever known me not to be?” He asks instead, kissing the join of Victor’s jaw where it twitches tense, the furrow in his brow. “I promise,” Dorian tells him. He trails his knuckles along Victor’s cheek and smiles against his mouth. “My dearest doctor.”

Beside the bed is a little flask, perhaps once used for perfume, of opaque lavender glass. Beyond being a passing curiosity to Victor when he could not sleep, its meaning becomes clear when Dorian - moving as little of his body away from Victor as possible - plucks free its closure and upends it into his hand.

“Olive oil,” Dorian tells him, noting Victor’s keen-eyed suspicion of it. He sets the glass aside with a click against the bedside table once more and slicks his cock as much to warm the glistening lubricant as to ready himself. His fingers slide slow to part Victor’s cheeks once more, stroking languid. “Is it overly formal if I say that this is an honor?” He laughs. “Perhaps I should instead confess torrid things - the scandalous number of nights I’ve spent imagining it…”

Victor snorts, clenches and relaxes his muscles again and again against Dorian’s hand as he watches him, unsure how he can ease himself into something so unusual without overthinking, unsure he is capable of not overthinking anything. It feels good, he settles on, it feels strange and tingling and slippery and good.

“Incorrigible,” Victor murmurs, and Dorian’s smile splits wider still.

“Did you not think about it?” He asks. “Hearing what sounds I would make beneath you?”

“No,” Victor bites his lip and there is the answer itself, not the word. He had imagined. But he had not imagined Dorian the one pressed to the sheets.

“Liar,” whispers Dorian, warmly catching Victor’s lips beneath his own before he can protest.

With patience edging towards uncertainty - Dorian delights in the thought - he teases the tip of a finger inward, sighing soft when the ring of muscle yields to his touch. Victor clenches immediately at the intrusion. Dorian whispers a gentle hush against his cheek.

“Breathe,” he tells his doctor. “It will feel unnatural until it doesn’t, and then -” Dorian grins, eyes closed, fucking a slender finger deeper in tender, small strokes. “Let me show you something of anatomy.”

“Says the artist to the doctor.”

“Precisely,” Dorian agrees, propping himself up on his free hand. Eyes hooded in pleasure, he curls his finger and rubs.

The sensation is entirely involuntary and Victor jerks with it, hands down to grasp the sheets, then one moving to his hair when that proves entirely not enough to ground himself in the pleasure of it. And it is pleasant. It is exquisite.

“ _Oh_ -” The sound comes as half a groan and half a gasp, and Victor feels his entire body shiver and grow warm all at once. He knows what this is, in theory, he has checked enough prostates for swelling to know what it is that Dorian has found.

He had assumed that arousal was a bodily response to any sort of intrusion. He had never expected it to feel like this.

With a low keen, he squirms, at once wanting more and to get away. He gasps, head back, when Dorian leans in, more pressure from his finger, though it remains gentle, and sucks a mark against his throat.

When he feels heat rise beneath his mouth, Dorian draws back enough to drag his tongue across the livid bruise left bright against pale skin. He nuzzles fiercely against Victor’s cheek, finding himself breathless already just from this - the tightness of Victor around him, loosening beat by beat around the careful twist of his finger, the stretch and pull and relentless rub. He is made breathless by Victor himself, stunning in his abandon, his carefully composed facade crumbling into beautiful ruin.

“Should I stop?” Dorian asks, grinning as Victor arches from the bed and just as quickly pushes himself down against Dorian’s finger.

“Don’t - don’t stop.”

“Will you tell me if I should stop?”

Victor wishes he could find his voice, enough to do more than moan helplessly as Dorian adds another finger and the pain of the stretch is countered entirely by the burning pleasure at the added sensation. He nods, shakes his head, licks his lip into his mouth and finally reaches to snare his fingers in Dorian’s hair to pull him closer.

“I tend to be -” Another gasp, another grin, and Victor lays back against the bed more, spread and shameless for it as Dorian nuzzles against him, works him slick and open. “- blunt and brutally honest.”

Dorian laughs against the curve of Victor’s throat, sliding his fingers free and taking himself in hand instead. “Thank God,” he murmurs, “that I’ve moved on from poets.”

Bent across his doctor, Dorian aligns himself and watches as a tense shiver ratchets up Victor’s spine. He stretches and bends, eyes wide, but settles again as their gazes meet. Dorian does not look away from him, not to his own cock as he works slowly past stretched, slick muscle, not to Victor’s length half-soft with alarm but still dripping. No, he watches only his doctor, measuring every shift in his features between want and wariness, desire and dread. Victor finally nods, just a little thing, but it’s enough.

And Dorian kisses him as he presses in.

There is pressure, a push that has Victor’s instincts screaming, but he does little more than press his fingers harder against Dorian’s scalp. Shallowly in, Dorian pulls free again, and starts again. A little thing, small shoves and turns so Victor can get used to the feeling. He sighs a hum against his doctor and Victor just nods.

More.

Again.

He won’t tell him to stop.

He makes another sound, little and low, and draws his knees up on a sigh as Dorian presses deeper. Open and allowing this despite the humiliation that inexperience paints upon him. Victor seeks for kisses, small and soft, delighting as much in the closeness of them as the sensation itself. He holds Dorian’s face framed and doesn’t tell him to stop.

“How dare you,” Dorian whispers, each stroke a little longer, a little deeper. “How dare you call yourself dreary, when you defy the word with your brilliance?”

He moans, high and sweet, as Victor’s body relaxes and allows him further entry. His spine curls, his hips round, forcing himself to as slow a rhythm as he can manage, smile widening when he feels Victor’s cock begin to stiffen again. He would not have expected this, not from someone so self-assured and stoic. He had expected to be bent over himself, giving guidance from beneath to one who assumed a position without wisdom enough to know what to do with it.

He is a wonder, a constant surprise, and Dorian nibbles Victor’s bottom lip, sucking it softly with a hum as he feels himself slip to the hilt.

“How dare you call yourself an awful companion,” he says, when his voice returns to him. “Do not speak so ill of someone I adore so entirely.”

Victor just moans, shaking beneath Dorian from the adrenaline and worry, from the pleasure and pain that spin in him with every heartbeat. He feels hot and cold at once, breathless and out of control entirely and he would hate it, would hate it in any situation but this.

Hands seek wide over Dorian’s smooth back, unmarred and unmarked, down lower to curl over the taut muscles of his ass, his thighs, following the movement of every smooth thrust into him, slow and careful, still, despite the curve of warning in Dorian’s words.

It is protective. It is possessive, and Victor could laugh for the novelty.

What has he done, he thinks, to earn this wonder?

Dorian’s hips buck harder, once, enough to send a jolt up through Victor’s body and bend his back towards the ceiling. The pleasures eases him to moaning, though he remains beautifully bent, and Dorian kisses his chest, lingering above his heart. Propped on one hand, he reaches with the other to bring Victor’s leg against his hip, and when his doctor holds it there, heel digging into Dorian’s thigh, he grins.

“Dearest doctor,” he sighs, “you were made for this.”

He ducks his head and watches now as he plants himself deep, toes digging against the tangled sheets. Skin snaps against skin as Dorian quickens, the head of his cock brushing Victor’s prostate again and again, with every thrust, throwing sparks behind his eyes as Victor lets them slip closed and just feels. Dorian skirts a hand across his hip and takes his doctor’s cock in hand.

He never would have imagined that the renowned doctor Victor Frankenstein could moan so beautifully. But he does, head turned into the pillow, lips parted wide and eyes closed, blush just tickling the ends of dark eyelashes that spread so warmly over his cheeks.

He is beautiful. He is just as extraordinary as he claims Dorian to be.

He trembles beneath Dorian and whispers his name, moans it and arches higher, into the practiced hand that strokes him, down to the thick cock that claims him. He wonders if humiliation will come later, if he will hide his face and squirm away, not return to the house now that Dorian has seen him come apart so _humanly_. He pushes the thought to the back of his mind and seeks with warm fingers for Dorian’s face, smiling as his palm is nuzzled, as Dorian kisses over his wrist.

He is a lover, decades and centuries of being one so well, and he has chosen to be here, now, with Victor.

The enormous bed rocks beneath them, steady thrusts but deep, forceful things that bring Victor’s cock to leaking over Dorian’s fingers. They slide back the delicate skin to reveal his swollen, flushed head, scarlet and shining slick, and Dorian thumbs across the slit, turning his hips to rub his cock against the sensitive spot inside his doctor. He is capable, skilled and decadent, and not once does he turn his attention to himself.

Why should he, when there is a far more fascinating man before him.

They can hardly kiss and instead pant lips to lips, gasping hitched sounds against the other.

“May I -” Dorian pleads, turning aside Victor’s head to kiss his cheek and moan against his ear.

“Please -”

“Will you?”

“Yes,” groans Victor. Quivering legs snare desperate around Dorian’s waist to hold him deep, _there_ , filling Victor as their bodies empty in thick dollops. Dorian squeezes as he moans; Victor begs his name as he clenches. Utterly still but for the pulsing of their cocks, and the tandem racing of hearts pounding vibrant life through both.

Victor’s throat clicks as he swallows, a small sound escaping him after, like a whine, a groan, and he turns enough to feel Dorian right there, soft against him, arms quivering where he tries to hold himself up. So Victor strokes his hands against them, eases him down so Dorian can lay pressed to him entirely.

He feels exhausted. He feels alive.

He aches in places he wasn’t aware could feel pain, or should, and he laughs. Victor brings a hand to his face and laughs against the palm, terrified that should he stop he will weep instead, overwhelmed entirely by this. And so Dorian kisses the back of his hand. He kisses his fingers, stretched across his cheek. He kisses to his temple and up into his hair. Everywhere that can be kissed is kissed, everywhere that cannot be kissed is stroked with silk-soft fingers.

“You are miraculous,” Dorian tells him. “Improbable. A way with words,” he teases, “and with life. You discredit yourself by saying otherwise, especially when I know you don’t believe it.”

He turns his hips enough to slip free of Victor, but only so that he can entwine him in limbs anew and entirely. Dorian traces his fingertips over his doctor’s collarbone, across his shoulder, over the swell of his bicep and into the basin of his elbow, marked with needle-point. Further still to turn their palms together, Dorian laces their fingers and brings Victor’s to his lips.

“I wish you could see yourself the way that I see you.”

Victor just hums, turning into Dorian more and wriggling to reach for the heavy sheets to pull atop them again so they can rest. He aches and he shivers, he is suddenly aware entirely of his body, and of the one before him, pressing close. He doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to let Dorian go, or let this become a passing whim for either of them.

Two monsters in a dying city.

“I think,” Victor sighs, leaning in to kiss just once more against silken lips, and then again. “I will trust your eyes this time.”

What Dorian has seen and known in his existence could fill volumes, and yet now - right now - he has little care for any of it. No one in his history seems as fascinating as the grim young man before him, softening despite himself. No one in his history might have responded to his confession with such acceptance. He is a man of science, yes, but he has in him an artist’s heart.

Dorian spans his fingers across it, and only lets himself settle to sleep when he feels it slow to peace.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I do not want to cause you pain,” Victor replies, sincere and soft._
> 
> _“But there is pleasure, as well,” Dorian reminds him, coiling like a cat, tempting and teasing. “Lightheadedness and shortness of breath - like the touch of a lover, but far more visceral.”_
> 
> _The doctor swallows again, hates that he is tempted, that he wants to see how long Dorian can bleed before he stops bleeding, if he will stop breathing, if he will stop moving. But games like that never end well, there is hardly ever a winner. He has played them before._

It begins, as most problems do, with good intentions and alcohol.

“Never?”

“I didn’t say never,” Dorian responds, pointing with his champagne glass. “ _You_ said never.”

“You know what I mean.”

Dorian laughs, bubbly as the drink that he then downs in one swallow. Curled against the incline of the chaise, in little more than his dressing gown, he draws his knees up higher and watches Victor with interest. His doctor is on the floor, leaning back against a dusty-rose velour armchair, down to his suspenders, rumpled shirt, and trousers.

Dorian watches his toes curl into the carpet and feels his cheeks blossom warmth as if in reply.

“Of course I’ve been ill,” he says. “But the last time it was anything serious was a long time ago. Before -” A hand-wave and glittering inebriation seems to suffice, so he carries on, and returns to fishing the stuck strawberry out from the bottom of his glass. “It isn’t invincibility. Not really. But illness remedies and wounds heal.”

“You still haven’t told me how.”

“You assume that I know,” Dorian shrugs, snaring his champagne-soaked strawberry and lofting it victorious. “The ill-considered wishes of a child. A Faustian accord, perhaps.”

Victor snorts, eyes uplifted as he sips from his own glass, sparkling amber in the candlelight. “I don’t believe in the Devil.”

“I do. It’s the only explanation that makes me feel at all comfortable with the world as it is,” he reasons. “It’s a far uglier possibility to assume that there is no great cause of Evil, and that everything is this way without reason or explanation.” Dorian sets the strawberry to his lips and sucks, watching Victor with hooded eyes. He slips it free again with a lurid _pop_. “There’s nothing more tiresome to discuss than morality. What were you on about before?”

The doctor licks his lips and takes another sip of champagne as he watches Dorian lounge, draped like a Renaissance painting across the chaise they had - amusingly - met upon. He is perfection in dark eyes and silk. He is exceptional. For some unknown reason, he is his.

“Disease and disuse,” Victor repeats, amusement curling his lips. “How you seem to be stuck in a perpetual cycle of healing and renewal, extraordinary in its simplicity and unfathomable in its practice. It should not happen.”

“And yet?” Dorian grins, biting into the berry and letting the juice slip down his fingers and over his knuckles. 

“And yet here you are, Dorian Gray,” Victor tells him, watching the red juice slither down Dorian’s hand to his wrist before he deigns to turn it and chase the drop with a red soft tongue. Victor wants to taste it again, but makes no move to stand and do so. Instead, he downs his drink and lets it warm and fuzzy his mind a little more.

He lets the flute dangle from his fingers and regards Dorian as he continues to slowly and deliberately devour the berry between his fingers.

“Here I am,” he finally agrees, sucking pink juice from his thumb before unfurling from the chaise. He lets his robe fan open unminded as he makes his way to the small side table again. “In spite of any number of diseases that have ravaged the city, in spite of the inordinate amount that should by all rights have befallen me by way of my proclivities alone.”

Another strawberry thunks to the bottom of the flute, topped with a hissing fill of champagne.

“And disuse?”

Dorian snorts, forcing amusement into the sound to hide how bitter it is, indeed.

“You’ve seen where I live. A once-grand manor falling slowly into disrepair beneath layers of dust layered thick as the Earth’s crust. Is a man’s home not a reflection of himself?”

He steps closer, bare feet sinking into the carpet, warmed by the fire roaring to stave away the chill of snow gathering on the window frames. With a finger just beneath the dimple in Victor’s chin, Dorian tilts his head upward. His doctor holds his head, just so, and Dorian feeds him a drop of champagne from his fingertip.

“And yet here I am.”

Victor sucks, soft and gentle, and watches as Dorian’s smile grows from the sensation, how his hand curls around his glass, how his body responds. Victor sets his own glass aside and brings his hands up to grasp the end of Dorian’s robe, pulling him closer as he straightens his legs more and spreads them, allowing Dorian to step nearer.

He pulls, a little more, and with a laugh, Dorian sinks to his knees over Victor’s lap and kisses him.

It is warm, affectionate, cloistered away from the world and anything but their dusty decadence and conversation. And observation. And comfort and sex.

“Do you feel pain?” Victor asks him, hands resting warm and gentle against Dorian’s lower back, thumbs caressing through the heavy silk. “As I might? Or another?”

Dorian rises higher onto his knees just to feel himself settle again, splayed content across Victor’s thighs. He dips his finger into the bubbling drink and his lips part in sympathy as his doctor suckles lightly again. He should take offense to the question, he supposes - the implication that something so universal as pain would be withheld from him. But wine has a way of warming, and Victor’s hands are hotter still.

“I feel pain,” he says, pressing his fingertip along the curve of his dear doctor’s tongue. “But whether my perception of it is the same as yours is like asking if we see ‘blue’ the same way.”

Victor hums as Dorian withdraws his finger.

“I do think, however, that the sensation has numbed,” Dorian murmurs into his glass, before taking another sip. “One can only feel something so many times before one develops something of an immunity to it. I am not weakened by it, but inured to it as anything more than a curiosity.”

“And pleasure?”

At this, Dorian tilts his head, eyes narrowing even as a brow lifts high. “Do I not praise you enough, darling, that you must go begging compliments?”

Victor just smiles, small, and takes the compliment for what it is. There are decades of experience difference between them, yet there has never been a moment where he has felt that distance.

"And as something you have experienced often enough to bring about immunity?" Victor asks him instead, eyeing the glass Dorian holds as the young man takes a drink.

"Pain has patterns, like a tapestry. Different designs and yet the same techniques to produce them. Pleasure is a woven melody, unique in every way. You could run your hand through my hair," Dorian suggests, and with a smile Victor obeys. Dorian turns into it like a cat, smooth and slow, eyes closing and smile widening. "And I would know it was you touching me. You have a way. You curl your fingers, scratch my scalp, tug -" He bites his lip, and Victor cups his cheek instead. "Variations, entirely different regardless of methods explained or demonstrated. Pleasure is nearly impossible to grow bored with, my dear doctor."

Victor swallows, settling back further against the chair that takes his weight, and smiles.

"Good," he says.

\---

It grows, as most problems do, from temptation.

“Damn.”

Steel smacks against wood not in alarm but in annoyance. Dorian turns and shoves his back against the counter, lips twisted together into a pout. He cradles one hand in the other, watching as blood beads near black in the low lights, welling from the carving knife’s cut and slicking thick down his finger.

He squeezes, lightly, to watch it run faster, dark drips smacking softly to the tile floor. As if unaware of his dear doctor’s attention on him, Dorian slowly turns his hand to spiral the thread of blood around his pale wrist. A laugh catches him off-guard, and he presses his clean palm to his face. He wonders how long it would take him to bleed out, if he never repaired himself of this, a deep cut through the center of his index finger. The wound might heal itself, unless he pulled it open further, dripping himself dry until drained entirely. Days, perhaps, vision growing dim as when a peasoup fog sets across the city’s gas lamps.

Equally, Dorian wonders how much deeper in his cups he is than he means to be, as the sensation of Victor’s gaze upon him sparks scarlet heat across Dorian’s cheeks.

“I detest cooking,” he murmurs, lips parting as he widens the wound a little, stretching it until his lips curl in a wince over broad, bright teeth. “Tell me again why we couldn’t go out? I’d have put clothes on for it, you know.”

"That was precisely the reason you didn't want to go out," Victor notes, unlike Dorian dressed and put together - a habit Dorian is still trying to break him of when they get out of bed. He watches the blood well and seep from the cut until it turns thicker, slower pulses of it now near-coating Dorian’s arm and dripping to the floor.

He can feel the urge to help, instincts well honed and skills developed, warm like an autumn sunbeam breaking through the clouds that hide it. He knows he should have Dorian hold it above his heart, he knows he should clean and bind it.

He knows he should stop Dorian spreading the wound further still, pushing more bright blood over his hand.

But he wants to know. He has to.

"How's your head?"

Dorian snorts. "Perfectly clear and filled with thoughts of terrible things. It's not my head I’ve injured, doctor."

"You've lost a lot of blood," is all Victor says.

“And there is yet more,” Dorian notes. “What a wonder, the human form.”

Victor’s bright-eyed sharp-honed attention sings through Dorian, sweet as wine and intoxicating as poppy smoke, pulling his heart to a faster beat. His blood moves thick and hot as opium resin beneath his doctor’s keen focus, pushing scarlet dark as rubies in a steady stream across lily-soft skin. With no mind for dinner, now, nor indeed anything but the ceaseless functions of his own body and the interest it draws from Victor, Dorian splays his hand wide and sets a thumbnail to the cut.

When he widens it, his lips curl and he rises to his heels, feet arched graceful.

“There is pain,” he confirms, eyes alighting to Victor. He slips his gore-dark thumbnail free and when he sighs, his toes splay through the puddle of blood on the tile beneath, and his sigh carries on it the whisper of a moan. “And there pleasure. How much is left, do you think?”

Victor swallows. He watches the blood drip from the point of Dorian’s elbow to the floor, he watches the way his fingers spread and press together again, the way the tips of them tremble as his body responds to the loss of something so vital. He knows it would take a lot more to have him go into shock.

He wonders if Dorian can.

“Enough,” Victor says, stepping closer and setting his hand beneath Dorian’s to support it, smearing warm blood against cool skin as he does.

He could let him bleed, watch how long it takes before the blood clots and settles the wound, how long it takes before Dorian is exhausted and stumbling from blood loss. He could. Part of him wants to, just to see. His own creations do not bleed, they haven’t that capacity, nor the fluids in their body to run at all. But Dorian…

Carefully, Victor leans to gather up a towel, binding the cut and turning Dorian’s hand to press to his shoulder. There is a lot of blood lost, slippery on the tile, smeared down Dorian’s body as he watches Victor so close. He should be suffering more than he is, he should be dizzy and unwell. He should be pale.

But Dorian is always pale.

He leans close to Victor, but does not touch him or press filth across his tidy clothes. The temptation is there, to go to the floor in a tangle of limbs and smears of scarlet. His breath whispers warm across his doctor’s lips as Dorian sighs.

“Now the room is spinning,” he grins, “with you so near.” Pale brown eyes seek between wide blue, before they lower to watch Dorian’s tongue part pallid lips. “Aren’t you curious?” Dorian asks, touching a cool kiss to Victor’s parted lips. “Of course you are. I wonder, though, if your interest is to see it made whole again, or cut me yourself.”

Victor’s breath stutters, it always does with Dorian this close, with Dorian whispering things in his ear that Victor never thought he wanted to hear or needed. He does not want to admit to what he wants. He knows, though, that he does not actually have to.

“I do not want to cause you pain,” he replies, sincere and soft.

“But there is pleasure, as well,” Dorian reminds him, coiling like a cat, tempting and teasing. “Lightheadedness and shortness of breath - like the touch of a lover, but far more visceral.”

The doctor swallows again, hates that he is tempted, that he wants to see how long Dorian can bleed before he stops bleeding, if he will stop breathing, if he will stop moving. But games like that never end well, there is hardly ever a winner. He has played them before.

“It is cruel to tempt a scientist with hypotheses to prove,” he whispers, smiling, and kisses Dorian softly before looking at him properly.

Dorian’s brows raise and his smile spreads. Languid, he rocks himself forward off the counter, clad in little more than drying rivulets of blood. Victor takes a step back to allow him room, his shoe slick against the floor.

“Will you tell me your hypotheses, at least? You may have found in me a perfect patient.”

“Currently compromised,” Victor reminds him, his smile like the candlelight that seems to surround them always, dancing brighter and then dim again. “Can you heal yourself?”

“I can.”

“Then I might tell you.”

Dorian clicks his tongue against his teeth and grins, taking lazy strides from the kitchen. “Stay,” he tells Victor. “I will go and dress myself, and we will discuss over dinner. Out, I think, if you are amenable.”

“Will you drag me to the Savoy again?”

“Not the way you’re dressed darling, but soon.”

Dorian leaves, and Victor watches after him, sighing quietly. “Marvellous.”

This house is never quiet, it groans and shifts with the wind, complains and creaks its old bones. Once a country house, now surrounded by industry and filth. Perhaps it has a right to be angry.

Victor seeks another towel, dropping it to the blood on the floor and watching the cloth immediately soak the color up. There is enough blood there, and on Dorian, not to be fatal but to certainly be harmful to any normal human being. Lightheadedness would occur but more than that, nausea and dizziness, shaking and panic. Genuine human panic. That, he realizes, is what had been missing from Dorian’s response. And his own.

He cleans the blood and considers leaving the towel in the sink to soak. Instead he finds himself folding it, taking another to wrap it in, and pockets it. And then he waits.

When Dorian returns, he has made nearly good on his word. His lower half is clad in sleek grey trousers, white spats and polished black shoes beneath. His top half is less so, shirt and cuffs open, his broad-striped black and white waistcoat slung atop. He sets to the counter a cutaway jacket, so dark a shade of emerald that only in particular light does the green show at all, and atop it a vivid verdant cravat. Sleek chest washed of blood, a smile plays across his lips, their color returned to them as flushed as unfurling spring peonies.

Victor finds his disbelief caught in limbo between wonder at the boy’s uncanny beauty, and a clinical gaze that finds nothing at all wrong with him. Dorian is the picture of health, lush with color. It seems unreal.

And yet here is.

Dorian Gray.

“It seems silly to go through all this work to dress ourselves when I know it’s only so that I can strip you bare again and bend you over,” he smiles, buttoning his shirt as he strides nearer. He stops only to extend his hand to Victor, slender fingers unfurling. “I suppose that’s the joy of it. Pretensions of propriety so that we may delight in its defiance.”

“You delight in all sorts of defiances,” Victor points out, and he takes his hand. He turns it in his own to kiss his knuckles, something that seems to entirely delight Dorian as he continues to work his shirt closed with one hand. Unsuccessfully.

“I am terrible,” Dorian purrs, leaning closer as Victor brings his own hands to work Dorian’s buttons done. He doesn’t attempt the necktie, time and again he has been chastised in the sweetest way for taking the term ‘tie’ seriously. There are more rules, apparently, to working done a cravat than merely knotting it.

“You are a walking defiance, certainly,” Victor smiles, and Dorian leans in to kiss him. Pressing soft and gentle to him before stepping closer, Dorian sets a hand - now entirely healed - to Victor’s cheek. The doctor makes a sound, small, and lightly puts his hands to Dorian’s chest to push him away.

“Dinner.”

“Must we?” Dorian pouts, licking his bottom lip into his mouth. Victor just shakes his head, amused.

“You taught me of anticipation, Dorian. Lead by example.”

\---

It reaches a crescendo, as most problems do, with misunderstanding.

“A week,” Dorian declares, standing with arms against the doorframe. Victor’s hands still against the buttons of his frock coat, still darkened beyond black where the snow melts into wool. He lifts his eyes, red-rimmed, and his lips part in silence as Dorian stalks closer, barefoot with shirt untucked above his trousers.

“Not a single word,” he continues. “Not a luncheon, let alone a dinner or breakfast. Not a call, not even a note -”

“I wasn’t aware I needed to keep you so informed,” Victor answers mildly. Shrugging free of his coat, he tosses it across the foot of the bed, and reaching unhesitant for the buttons of his shirt, the doctor moves closer to Dorian and offers a smile. “I’m here now.”

“A week,” Dorian says again, sweeping Victor’s hands away to undo him instead. Their brows meet, lips brushing as their blushes stoke brighter in the firelight. Dorian scolds Victor with his kiss, breath pushed from in him a hissing exhale against his doctor’s cheek. “I worried, dearest, I worried that you were bored of me already. Were you working? Of course you were,” he answers himself, teeth pressing to Victor’s bottom lip as he steps him backward. Victor’s shirt is shoved to the floor, his tie jerked loose and curled around Dorian’s fist. “There must be a plague broken out to have kept you so quiet. Or perhaps my first suppositions were correct and I must work harder to keep your interest.”

Victor goes, devoured entirely by Dorian’s obsession and almost childish desire to have him close again. He steps as he is led, bends his knees then they hit the bed and sits down on it, welcoming the coiling beauty atop him when Dorian settles into his lap, hands against his face and pressing close in another heated kiss.

“Hardly,” Victor murmurs, lips parting on a soft gasp as Dorian’s hands slip between his thighs and stroke him, just so, enough to have Victor bite his lip and sigh out a long breath through his nose. “You were on my mind the entire week.” He laughs, warm and breathless. “Plaguing me.”

He sets his hands to Dorian’s face and strokes the smooth skin beneath his eyes. “Would you have prefered I sent flowers? Poor half-wilted things I could afford from my hovel in east London?” He grins when Dorian’s lips purse, and presses a thumb against them, watching Dorian part them immediately on a small smile. “I missed you.”

Dorian sucks his thumb with a hum, spin coiling down to a shove of his groin, possessive, against his doctor’s own. He releases the digit with a gentle _pop_ and bears him back, hands against Victor’s shoulders and mouth against his throat.

“For someone with as much work as you seem to have,” he says between sucking kisses, blooming like spring violets, “I am shocked to know you live in the East End.”

Victor bucks his hips in response and plants his hands against the mattress, pushing higher across the bed with Dorian in close pursuit. Soft chest hair pulls straight between Dorian’s fingers as he spans his hands over Victor’s chest. One dips lower, over twitching stomach, to seek the fasten of Victor’s trousers.

Victor groans, fingers trembling as they set to the flowing fabric of Dorian’s shirt, silk so thin it feels like water against him, fluttering and flowing as Dorian sinks against Victor. There is a possessiveness there, alongside the genuine desire to see Victor again, there is certainly an element of missing him, needing him, aching - 

“If you had your way I would live here,” Victor points out, biting his lip and arching up as Dorian draws his fingers over a dark nipple, Victor responsive to it but never as sensitive to it as Dorian is.

“But would you?” Dorian laughs, kissing his way down the warm hair from Victor’s navel to the opened button of his pants. “It seems I would have to be dead or dying to get your attention some days.”

“Aren’t you?”

Dorian stops, breath spilling slow against the tender skin beneath Victor’s navel, fingers hooked around his trousers’ waistband. A sigh pools hotter, a laugh if anything so mirthless could be called that, and Dorian lifts pale tawny eyes to look up the length of Victor’s half-bared body.

“Is that why you’re here?” He asks. With a savage jerk, he snares Victor’s pants to below his pointed hips. It is far from the tenderness that sustained them for weeks before, eager explorations genuine in their seeking. Brute force and narrowed eyes now join their act, as Dorian sits up with knees digging harsh to spread Victor’s legs.

“You know you’ve never told me what you do,” Dorian tells him, voice purring warm with the heat of venom beneath it. “I can imagine why. Like Burke and Hare, or worse. A vivisectionist not for little bunnies and helpless squeaking mice, but for larger subjects.”

Victor’s eyes flash wide, catching candlelight like the sun across ice, and Dorian leans across him, hands planted to either side of his head. He lifts a leg and shoves Victor’s pants down to his knees, toes caught in the confines.

“There is a blade, delicate and sharply honed, in the drawer beside my bed. Reach for it,” Dorian bids him, “and take what you want of me.”

“No.” Victor sounds almost indignant, yet above him, Dorian presses like a predator, shirt slipping from his shoulder, hair hanging over his eyes. He is almost feral in his beauty, something beneath the surface flutters, almost visible, and then Victor blinks and it’s gone once more.

“I come here for you, I -”

“Liar.”

Victor swallows, brows furrowed, and after a moment asks only, “Why is there a blade by your bed?”

“Why is that your foremost concern?” Dorian counters, quickly. Hard enough to drive Victor’s breath from him in a puff beneath Dorian’s weight, the latter sits upon the former’s stomach and tilts his head. Nearly feline in his manner, the cat seated atop a helpless bird to watch it struggle, Dorian smiles languid and stretches, snapping open the drawer beside the bed. “Protection,” Dorian says, and Victor’s smile wrinkles his nose, eyes sharp.

“No.”

“No,” agrees Dorian, lifting from the nightstand a corset knife, thin and flashing sharp as a razor’s edge. “Pleasure, I think.” The steel presses cold to Victor’s chest as Dorian lays it there beneath his palm, brows raising. “So sate yourself and me in turn, and do what you will.”

Another swallow and Victor shakes his head, setting a hand to Dorian’s above the blade, gently shifting it away to push the weapon aside. “Dorian, stop.”

“You would deny me my pleasure?”

“You don’t get pleasure from this.”

“Have you ever asked?” Dorian raises an eyebrow, and Victor finds his words caught in his throat, because he never has, in truth. “Have you ever asked anything about me but the arbitrary small talk that permeates the air in every godforsaken street and bar in this filthy city?”

“Dorian, please -”

“Please?”

“I misspoke,” Victor sighs. “I’m tired. I don’t sleep well without you. Please just… forgive me.”

“You spoke in truth,” Dorian contends, though he slides the blade from Victor’s chest to the mattress beside them. Instead, he seeks another dagger to cut wide, hand plunging between Victor’s legs. “Does Morpheus himself not exist between draughts of wine and the moments before sleep? And he carries with him truth that would not be spoken readily by the cognizant. You called me dead.”

“No,” whispers Victor, trembling fingers pressed shaking to Dorian’s cheeks. “No.”

“Yes,” Dorian sighs in answer, soft as any words of love that might find his way to his lips instead. They are that, the words he speaks, a ravine that joins through savage splitting the space between love and spite. Their lips forge the divide, a kiss so deep it draws a helpless keening from deep in Dorian’s very being.

“I missed you,” he whispers. “I missed your uncertain hands trembling against my skin. I missed the heat of your body tight around the penetration of my own.” In emphasis, Dorian rocks his hips, rough cotton trousers scraping heat again Victor’s bare cock. Dorian too is stiff with desire, length straining against the confines of his clothing, seeping a dark spot against the fabric. “What did you miss of me? I do wonder.”

“I missed _you_ ,” Victor insists, squirming beneath his lover to try and shift free.

“What _of_ me!” Dorian demands, voice at once commanding and entirely helpless, almost childish. “What of _me_ did you miss, Victor? The fact that I cannot die? The fact that I will indulge your every whim in experimentation and cautious exploration? The fact that I heal and appear as though I was never hurt?”

“Dorian.” The displeasure is scarcely hidden beneath the breathy hum that pulls from Victor at the feeling of Dorian’s hand stroking him. He has missed this, the sex, the intimacy, he has missed the closeness of another human being, he has missed talking to Dorian, about history and poetry and everything in between.

“Should I play dead?” Dorian asks next, pressing a hot kiss to Victor’s jaw before settling over him, still and heavy. “Slow my heart? Attempt to stop it?”

“Don’t.” At this, Victor does manage to wriggle free, leaning down to yank his pants back up his thighs as he watches Dorian lay on the bed forlorn and petulant, a pouting toddler without his toys. For a moment he is infuriated. Infuriated that this is what they have become, even when he knows that most of the blame here is on him. Enough is on Dorian. And that, to him, is enough to spit anger. “Grow up.”

Dorian’s breath leaves him on a near-laugh, brows raising high beneath his tousled hair, heart hammering in his throat. He lays on the bed as if he were a sparrow, not killed on impact upon glass it cannot see but wounded, drawing his limbs inward in defense. The words sting. His expression shadows.

“How quickly you’ve changed,” Dorian whispers. “But a virgin when you came here, blushing livid at the slightest contact. And no sooner are you _fucked_ than you levy insults as if I'm the one who sought you, simpering.”

Victor snatches up his shirt from the floor and his jacket from the bed, and Dorian draws tighter on himself, fingers clenching and unfurling.

“Wouldn’t I, if I could?” Dorian wonders, as much to himself as to the doctor who avoids his gaze. Dorian’s gaze narrows, sharp as the blade beside him on the bed and equally as unrelenting. “But you’ve no mind for that, do you. I’m far too alive, despite myself, for your interests.”

“You think too much of yourself,” Victor counters, uncaring if his shirt doesn’t button properly, pulling his jacket over the top enough to cover himself. “You are important but you are not the center of the world, Dorian, not even yours.”

Dorian makes a sound and Victor steps back from the bed, eyes away from him and cheeks still flushed bright. He is hard, still, despite this, as is Dorian when he rests back on his elbows and narrows his eyes at the doctor.

“I had work,” Victor repeats, stopping at the door. “I have a life outside of you. If you insist so ardently that you are alive, _far too alive_ for me, then perhaps prove it and get out of your gilded cage once in a while, for more than arbitrary dinner - you don’t even need to eat.”

Dorian’s gaze drifts lower as he blinks, brows knit. In his throat, his stubborn heart chokes him, and he swallows hard, as if by doing so he might crush the thing once and finally. He does not reach for the blade, though aware of its presence. Aware, as he is, of all things that might harm him. He lifts his gaze again to Victor.

“Perhaps I shan’t, then, and you might measure in your little book how long it takes me to feel pain,” Dorian suggests, lunging suddenly forward towards the edge of the bed, on his knees as Victor pulls closed his coat. “Then you would come calling, wouldn’t you? With regularity, every hour, so that you might delight in my wasting.”

When Victor moves, so too does Dorian, bare feet slapping to the floor to stalk behind his doctor as he goes.

“Go,” spits Dorian. “Go back to your withered remains, lifeless things that they are. Go back and make yourself just like them. Do you think I don’t see your veins split in two along your arm? You’ve no love to spare, Victor Frankenstein, when you’re too busy filling syringes with it.”

Victor turns then, slowly, eyes wide and lips parted before his jaw sets and he blinks and looks away, bringing up a hand to rub over his mouth.

“Love?” He asks, and the word feels like poison, like something filthy and decayed against his lips. “What love, Dorian? If there is love, this is not it. This is _consumptive_ , not consuming. And as you cannot die, I will be one to take the burden of this particular endeavor and I have work to do yet. I have people to help. Real people.”

One step closer, just one, Victor’s finger raised almost in warning before he changes his mind and steps back, making for the door and pulling it open, uncaring for what cold wind it lets in as he leaves.

Dorian gives chase enough to the doorway, heels slamming hard against the floor, but at the threshold he stops. Fingernails dig against unyielding wood, older than himself though not by much, and his lips curl across his teeth. His heart pulls at him, ugly blackened thing that it is, sparking like charred wood in a fire that cannot take light.

“Gird yourself in your own esteem,” Dorian calls after him, as Victor lifts a hand to wave down a carriage. “Feel yourself noble as you lay your hands on lifeless, cold flesh and then inject yourself to warm it again. I hope it brings you the rest you claim you cannot find without me.”

He does not wait to watch the pain in Victor’s eyes. In truth, he isn’t certain that it’s there. It hardly matters, with Dorian’s soul-deep wounds rent wide and his heart bared to the blowing snow. Dorian slams the door and locks it, and only when the clatter of carriage wheels fades across the cobblestones does he sling his fist into the wall and cry out at the crackle of bones breaking within.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“It is a sweeter pain we cause each other,” Dorian murmurs, “than those agonies we level upon ourselves. If we must hurt, and I think in our very natures, we must, then let us hurt beautifully.”_

Victor knows only that he is shaking. Whether it is from the chill in him from the storm, or the cold in his blood from lack of morphine is unclear, and it really doesn’t matter. He is shaking and there are no warm arms to wrap around him, no soft breaths to shift the hair at the back of his neck and he misses that.

One grows used to good things quickly, he knows.

Four days and counting, and stubborn as they both are, neither have reached out to their other, neither have made the attempt to make amends after cruel jeers and harsh words were thrown in an empty house. But Victor cannot work, he cannot sleep, he cannot grant himself more self-medication, knowing how much he has in his blood already. He is a doctor, after all, in the end, he knows what not to do, and yet -

The carriage rattles away and he doesn’t even care anymore that it is an ungodly early hour of the morning, that he is only half dressed, in his haste to get here, that he is disheveled and exhausted and hurting.

He is here. He will swallow his pride, goddammit, if it means he can breathe and feel alive again.

He hasn’t, since he left his heart in the mansion before him now.

The door rattles hollow into the house as he brings his fist down against it. Again and again and again, until he finally he sets his brow there instead and drops his fist to his side. The carriage waits, horses driving their hooves against stone in impatience. Victor understands the sentiment acutely; he knows that they seek food and shelter and relief from work in the same way that Victor himself seeks his own reprieve.

He lifts his hand to wave them away, and he waits.

Perhaps Dorian has finally left, as Victor told him he should. He may be at the Savoy now, laughing raucous with other beautiful young men. He may be gracing lower abodes with his presence, coiled around a beautiful woman and whispering honeyed words into her ear.

And if he is, then Victor will wait. Whatever it is about this house, it pulls Dorian back - from travel and from too many nights away, from the outward life to which a young man of his status and class should cleave. He will return. He must.

Victor turns his back to the door but his body jerks straight again as soon as the snap of a lock vibrates through his spine. Another, and another, and another, until he turns and as he does, the door swings wide. Baleful pale eyes meet his, ringed charcoal-dark against pallid skin.

“Come to see the results of your study, have you?”

Victor blinks, lips parting in surprise. Dorian looks exhausted. Any number of words or nights or times he had shown Victor he did not need sleep or food, he had never looked this terribly... human. Victor’s heart pulls against his ribs and he makes a quiet sound.

“There was no study.” Is his voice truly so rough? Ill-used and forgotten for anyone but the man before him?

“I don’t need to eat,” Dorian reminds him, drawing a deep breath. As when he dug his thumbnail into the cut across his finger to widen it nearly to bone, he reopens wounds with parted lips and narrowed eyes. “Nor sleep, one wagers. Do you wish to know how I feel? My symptoms -”

“Dorian, please.”

“I am cold,” he says. “Everywhere. Beyond shivering, my bones ache. I can feel the muscle peeled from them to feed my body as I will not. My head throbs, outpaced in pain only by my heart, squeezing tighter with each moment that passed without sustenance. Not that of food,” Dorian tells him. “No. Without you.”

Victor steps closer and finds that Dorian lets him. His hands are cold, too cold, fingertips paler than cool-pink palms, one cut oozing blood, forced to, but now clotted enough to not, unless encouraged. One hand looks damaged, purpled and bruised, fingers curled together. Dorian does not flinch when Victor brings it to his lips to kiss, to breathe warmth into it again.

He cannot see him this way, not this cold, tortured, dying thing.

“I miss your voice,” he whispers, as though the question from days before is still asked and hanging between them. “In any language. I miss the way the tip of your nose runs against the skin just behind my ear. I miss your smile, Dorian, bright and alive, and you are, you are alive, and more human than I could ever be.”

He swallows, turns his face against the chilled fingers. “I’m sorry.”

Dorian touches his tongue to dry lips and parts them, stepping back to allow Victor to step forth. A single step met by a single step, twice more until Dorian can swing the door shut behind him, and only so ensconced in the darkness of his home does he come nearer, instead.

There are no candles lit, the curtains drawn, as always. Locked in perpetual night, lifeless and empty.

“I should not have tried to take you from your work,” Dorian says, his voice startling Victor before soft fingers against his cheek sooth him again.

“I should have called on you.”

“I should not have pushed you,” Dorian says, his voice insistent as he wraps his arms around Victor’s neck and pulls himself to his toes.

Strong arms wrap around Dorian’s middle and hold him tight, close. The shirt that had once felt like liquid against his fingers is heavy now with old sweat and dirt. He wonders what rooms Dorian stalked like a ghost as he waited. To see Victor again, to die -

He doesn’t allow himself to consider. Not that.

“Love makes fools of learned men,” Victor sighs, drawing a hand up to Dorian’s hair and holding him pressed entirely to his chest. Dorian makes a small sound, more helpless than he has ever let anyone see him be before, with no energy left to maintain his bravado and charm. He pulls his arms tighter around Victor’s neck and gasps as he’s lifted, legs snaring Victor’s hips.

“Do you,” he asks, as Victor carries him through inky hallways. There is no one there, little enough furniture besides. The void surrounds them, empty, and Dorian does not look to it, instead burying his face against his doctor’s neck. “Can you?”

Victor laughs but it is hardly mocking - self-deprecating, perhaps. He finds the stairs by memory alone and takes them slowly up to the bedroom, carrying Dorian limp as linen against him.

“I feel it has been thrust upon me, uncaring for whether I am capable or willing,” he admits, and turns his head to kiss against Dorian’s messy hair. “All I know is that without you I find the needle far more welcome, I find destruction my only solace in an empty life. And with you… I would rather build it.”

He sets Dorian down gently just by the bed and looks at him, hands up to stroke his messy hair from exhausted eyes. Even like this, he is beautiful, like a porcelain doll that fell down behind the couch, catching dust and dirt, but never losing its beauty.

“I don’t know if I can. But I know I can’t do that again, not -” He licks his lips and takes a breath, lost, for a moment.

A smile, soft, curves Dorian’s voice.

“Then don’t,” he says. Simply, beautifully - just that. He slips his hands down Victor’s arm, folding back his sleeve. He has not bothered with a jacket, nor a waistcoat, down to his suspenders in his desperation to be here again. Dorian presses a kiss against Victor’s wrist, tracing with his mouth the risen, polluted rivers of his doctor’s veins. Higher, and higher, until Victor chokes back a small sound, and Dorian lays his lips against the copper tang of blood and bruised heat at the inner bend of Victor’s elbow.

“We are both prone to poor behavior,” Dorian whispers, holding Victor’s arm to his lips with his good hand, the broken one gnarled beneath. “And yet we are both capable of creating beauty. Together, the pieces fit. Together, we fit,” he says.

Dorian’s breath whispers higher, heating the thin fabric of Victor’s shirt, spreading across his throat as Dorian snares a finger beneath a suspender and tugs his doctor back to the bed. Unmade, still, tangled sheets preserving the mangled wreckage of their first fight.

“Let us create,” Dorian suggests, “rather than destroy.”

Victor follows, careful with the broken hand Dorian seems to have no inclination to fix, careful against him entirely, bending to kiss against Dorian’s neck, down to his stark collar bone and bony shoulder. Victor peels the filthy shirt from him and tosses it away, breathes in the cold and pain, the sadness beneath the perpetual sweetness of Dorian’s skin.

Slowly, he leans enough to press Dorian to the bed, his own hands coming up to lower the suspenders down, to work open the buttons of his shirt as he kneels over Dorian and kisses him continuously, small things, deep and warm things, nuzzling kisses and little licks, again and again. Dorian bends for him, to meet his mouth and to allow Victor’s hands to remove from him his trousers, too.

The sense of _deja-vu_ is nearly dizzying. Four days before, they laid nearly the same as now, bodies responding to the other with sparks of life and quickening hearts. Four days before, they broke apart and hurled invectives sharp as stones at the other, leaving cracked bones and bruises that have not begun to heal until now.

Clasping Victor’s hand with his working one, Dorian brings his doctor’s fingers between his legs. Abandon curls Dorian’s spine towards the ceiling as Victor grasps his stiffening cock and wraps his lips around a small, dark nipple to suckle it stiff. A laugh spills into the darkness, luminous and bright - a sweet sound that centuries of others have heard and now reserved for only Victor Frankenstein.

He would hate admitting it, for fear of his words being construed as cruelties, but Victor has missed this beyond reason, knowing he is the one causing Dorian such pleasure that he writhes with it, loses his breath and his voice and his entire being to it. He has missed being the one to wake him this way and sigh against his skin. He has missed the way Dorian drapes over him in sleep.

He laps and sucks at him until his hand is slick with precome, Dorian entirely gone in his inhibitions, unrestrained in his pleasure. Warm kisses work down the center of Dorian’s chest, over his flat stomach, to the tip of his cock that nudges against Victor’s chin before he takes it into his mouth instead.

Here, he is unpracticed. He had cried out, embarrassingly loud, when Dorian had done this to him for the first time, rolling his tongue languid over him and letting Victor lose himself to every sensation his body could accommodate for at once. But his lack of technique seems to hardly matter when Dorian groans his name and drops a hand into Victor’s hair to tug it. He lifts his eyes to see the silhouette of Dorian’s body, traced in the silvery light that spills mercurial past the curtains. Alabaster-smooth and just as pale, Dorian lifts his body with a keening moan, a rippling that digs his shoulders into the mattress and unspirals twisting down to his hips.

“Slow,” Dorian whispers, thumb stroking across Victor’s temple. “But firm.” The consonant draws long as Victor hollows his cheeks to suck steady pressure around the head of Dorian’s cock. It tightens the basin of his belly, hollowed beneath Victor’s hand, and though Dorian still clutches his hair, he is not cruel. He does not push or force, he does not drive his length deeper seeking consuming heat and immediate release.

He need not, it seems, considering the hitched breaths he takes, each framed in the high whimper of Dorian’s voice. Dorian’s cock twitches heavy against Victor’s tongue, filling his lips to stretching. Flushed and full, the copious spillage slicking hot from his length falls now to the back of Victor’s mouth, until - always curious - Victor circles his tongue around the delicate, gathered wrinkles of Dorian’s foreskin.

“No,” Dorian whispers, gasping, laughing, more out of his senses than Victor has ever seen him with or without intoxicants. “No, don’t make me yet. Come, please.” Only then does he curl his fist enough in Victor’s hair to bring his doctor against his body, lapping languid between his lips as he turns his doctor to his back and unfastens his high-waisted trousers.

“Promise,” insists Dorian. He slicks his fingers with spit and slowly slips them between Victor’s legs, the stiff fabric of his pants pulled tight over his hard cock and Dorian’s thin wrist. “Promise you won’t go again, not like that.”

“No,” Victor sighs, licking his lips, releasing them with a groan. A promise, entirely sincere. He cannot imagine what could drive him away like this had. Not again. Never again. He will not cast himself into that lonely hell again, and he will not do so to Dorian.

Hands grasp awkward against Dorian’s hair, down his spine, cupping his ass to move him closer, to coax him between Victor’s spread legs. He could not deny his words, that once he had tasted that pleasure, that forbidden and delicious thing, he could not get enough of it. Dorian is addictive, sweeter than any morphine, sharper than any jarring spike of cocaine.

He is life, pure life, unending, in a beautiful human form.

Victor whimpers, parts his lips and accepts the kiss Dorian bestows upon him, and doesn’t tell him why he made the sound.

A trembling sensation, half-pleasurable and half-fearful, pimples Victor’s skin as Dorian sucks kisses across his doctor’s softly furred chest and tender belly, his good hand leading the movements of his mouth. When Dorian touches him between his legs, Victor startles. Always within is the expectation that Dorian’s hand will be cool, rather than warmed by hot pulse of blood as it always is. Too many years alone, grasping dense dead limbs and stiffened skin. Too many years chilled to unyielding by the basement in which Victor works surrounded by decontextualized portions of the human form.

He eases his hips up into the hollow of Dorian’s hand, firm strokes twisting round the head of his cock, wrist bending as he screws his fist down to the base. Victor’s eyes open just enough to see how Dorian holds his other hand aside, curled in on itself, useless. He wonders how long Dorian might have lived with the purpled pain of it, bones pressing livid marks beneath his skin, out of spite for Victor’s flight from him, perhaps out of guilt for his own behavior.

No. Not the latter.

Dorian’s thumb against the slit of his cock, slipping back his foreskin to push clear fluid in a languid circle, brings Victor back to him with a moan of near-pain derived entirely from pleasure. The beautiful boy’s body is blade-sharp in the moonlight, flashing white. He does not need a knife beside his bed.

Dorian is the knife.

Victor’s cock bounces back stiff against his stomach as Dorian takes his own in hand instead, lining himself, entering rough, with no more than Victor’s inexpertly applied spit to ease the way.

His hands clench to fists against Dorian’s back, shaking arms laid over his shoulders. Near feral, snarling into an ensnaring kiss, Dorian pushes harder. It is enough to bury himself within his doctor, enough to nearly split Victor in half. The pain is welcome, though tears swell and spill from red-rimmed eyes. After days of numb unfeeling, the pain is necessary. His lips part in silent, blissful agony, and he can do no more than let himself be kissed by Dorian.

“I thought only of you,” Dorian whispers. “Locked away with your vivisection and your needles, coughing wet in some damp basement. A dozen times or more I started to leave, to come for you and find you, only to realize I’d no idea where to begin searching. And if you never returned to me? I would raze the East End to the ground to save you from that black-veined death, darling.”

Dorian’s voice topples into a moan, sinking into a languid kiss, tongues licking between their lips. If his words are poison, burnt as they are with an acrid edge of toxicity, then at least, Victor thinks, at least their taste is sweet. Their honey sticks in his clicking throat as he breaks away to breathe and tries to swallow.

“Let nothing be lost to us,” Dorian insists, as with his body he demands. “Let us be afraid of nothing. Please,” he asks, as he always asks, and Victor drops a quivering hand to his face to muffle his helpless laugh. “Let me love you as I must. I’ve no choice in the matter any longer.”

Victor just makes a sound, little and aching, and holds Dorian closer. Could either of them escape this, he supposes they should try. He did mean what he said, amidst the cruelties and harsh allusions. Their love is consumptive.

Never before has he wanted, willingly, to be so helpless to an uncontrollable force.

Dorian and love both.

He takes every rough thrust with shuddered breathing and a tightening of his fingers against Dorian's back. Harder and harder, marks left over perfect skin until Dorian near mewls with pleasure. Every breath that Dorian steals from him is replenished with endless whispers, as if his lungs were choked with poetry that cannot be stopped from filling every sigh. A terrible passion consumes them now, contagious, a sickness of spirit that possesses each incurable to love and to be loved.

By someone who sees them as they truly are.

By another who knows their iniquities and does not rebuke them.

Dorian’s hand snares beneath Victor’s jaw, squeezing enough that Victor can feel his own pulse struggling against Dorian’s fingers. He turns his head aside as Dorian guides him, he yields to this and the battery of brutal penetration and the violent violet adoration suckled against his throat. When Dorian’s thrusts jerk erratic and suddenly still, gouting semen inside him, he does not relent even then, his aching cries splintering into softer desperation.

“You dizzy me,” he murmurs, words slurred as if intoxicated, eyes heavy and dark as if drunk. He is, perhaps, for Victor can find no other words to describe what they do to each other. “Let me dizzy you.”

He pulls free once soft, and bends his hips upward as he lowers his body and bows his head, swallowing Victor whole.

A curse then, loud and drawn out as Victor tries to control himself, laughing and moaning and shivering in the bed. He should be humiliated, showing his emotions so blatantly, being so loud and open and responsive. He should be ashamed.

And yet there is such a thrill to it, to have a beautiful boy between his legs, sucking attentively and lewdly until Victor arches with a muffled groan and snares a hand in Dorian’s hair tight.

"Never again," he breathes. "Without you the air in my lungs taste of acid and ash."

It is as rough a claiming with Dorian’s mouth as it had been with his cock, and Victor lets him have this. Lets Dorian have him, entirely. And what Victor gives, Dorian takes, deep enough that Victor can feel the squeeze of his throat and the hammering pulse that echoes his own. Deep enough that every moan sings vibrations through to his very core. Deep enough that the tip of his nose brushes against the coarse tangle of hair at the base of his cock and deep enough that when he ejaculates Dorian’s body goes as rigid as Victor’s own. His shoulders tense, fingernails digging crescents into Victor’s belly, throat collapsing tight as he chokes and swallows.

He eases back just enough that Victor can see his length softening between swollen lips, shining with spit and flushed red. Dorian suckles languid, sweeping his tongue across the head, beneath the corona, down further to lap up every drop of seed smeared across his shaft. It hurts, wonderfully hurts, when his cock grows sensitive and still Dorian holds it in his mouth. Only when Victor cannot contain the little sound that whimpers weak past his lips does Dorian relent.

Their gazes meet and hold, as Dorian draws himself up to sit kneeling between Victor’s legs. He does not let them close, nor does he allow Victor to cover the ivory sleek skin stretched tight over sharp bones, the shadows in the hollows of ribs and hips, the dusting of hair dark across his torso.. He catches Victor’s wrist when he reaches for a sheet, and brings his doctor’s fingers to his lips instead, broken hand cradled in his lap as Dorian kisses Victor’s palm.

“It is a sweeter pain we cause each other,” Dorian murmurs, “than those agonies we level upon ourselves. If we must hurt, and I think in our very natures, we must, then let us hurt beautifully.”

What can Victor do but agree?

Dorian allows him his sweet recovery, and then takes his leave of him and moves properly into the house once more.

He had found that spending hours, alone and cold and in the dark, has pulled from within him a strange kinship to himself. An introspective meditation, so to speak, between the horror that lives within a gilded frame and the form that walks within a gilded cage.

He takes a candle, now, and makes his way to the gallery.

The door opens as silently as any number of secrets whisper In these walls, and Dorian enters similarly without a word. He needs none to confront his inner self. He has seen the capabilities of his own sins and his own undoing. Once faced with your most true self, you become fearless.

What is there to fear when you see every scar and scrape of time and indecency against your own skin?

Guilt, perhaps.

Dorian considers the sensation, the half-truths that twine within his grand declarations of love and possession. It bears upon his shoulders and tightens his ribs. It tastes of raw anise on his tongue, and there, too, he still tastes Victor. A strange man with an extraordinary mind and a heart too long chained by the constraints of asceticism and stoic adherence to propriety, who now finds himself unleashed and freed for perhaps the first time in his life. Dorian envies him that.

Now there - there is an emotion with which Dorian is all too familiar.

But what of the strain across his back, as he studies the chains that tighten around himself in smears of dull grey oil? For his acceptance of the truths Dorian has told him, he cannot help but wonder how Victor would respond to this - the invariably cruel revelation of the fractured and monstrous soul to which he has willingly, entirely and blindly, committed himself?

Dorian stretches his fingers as the swelling shrinks and bruises fade, and watches his painting’s hand curl in on itself, bones pushing sharply outward against pallid skin. He feels his hunger fade as his spirit hollows with it. And there, just there, in a subtle movement of the light through titanium white and yellow ochre, he sees his soul bend with the weight of shame for his collusion.

All things considered, he feels much better as he leaves himself behind.

Quick steps, taking the stairs two at a time, carry Dorian to the sound of water running in the en suite bathroom. That is a modern luxury in which he quickly indulged, a rare moment of allowing his house to be altered. Without any more servants to bring hot water from the boilers below, Dorian could hardly be asked to do it himself. Steam curls from the open door where newly-lit candles sputter bright, and he slows as he approaches the doorway.

“Have you eaten?” Dorian asks. “I’m certain I could find something for you, if you’d like.”

Victor looks up, even more pale and exhausted In the candlelight, and smiles, the expression allowing his youth to be properly seen. A prodigy. A power in his field and branching out into others. Dorian allows his eyes to slide over Victor’s body and he grins as the other blushes deep and steps back from the tub as it fills.

"I cannot remember when last I did," Victor admits, regarding the now flawless beauty before him. Adonis. Hyacinth. Ganymede. 

He is the beauty in the poetry Victor reads, and it is suddenly so funny to him that in all likelihood, he is, literally.

"But I would rather you stay, for now."

Dorian comes to him, his mended hand curling against Victor’s jaw. He frames his face and strokes a thumb across his the shadow of his cheek, joining their lips gently together.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Dorian promises. His grin appears in a flash before Victor grasps for his waist, and Dorian turns quickly aside to avoid it. He sets the brass candelabra on the wooden vanity, points of light reflecting scattered into the bathroom, sparkling off tile floors and shining fixtures. “There are sachets, there in the drawer - lavender and geranium petals to scent the water. Rest, dearest, and wait for me. I’ll only be a moment.”

Victor makes a sound of complaint that to Dorian’s ears is as sweet as any words of praise.

He knows the house by heart, could draw it from memory and navigate it blind. The darkness does not slow him as he goes to the kitchen, first, to seek out fruits not yet given way to decay in their days apart, squares of chocolate tossed to the plate beside. Dorian laughs to himself, the sound of it bubbling and fading in the hollows of the house. He might never have attempted such domesticity before Victor, and it is a rare joy indeed when he finds a new pleasure in which to indulge.

“You’ll stay tonight, won’t you?” Dorian asks as he returns, though the question itself is a thing of politeness rather than lack of knowledge. “And tomorrow. You’ll be glad for the rest and I promise that your dead things will remain in much the same state for when you return.”

Victor snorts gently but doesn’t argue. The formaldehyde will keep anything in it well enough that he can spare a few days - perhaps a week - here without worry. And he wants to, which he knows is the most telling thing. He straightens, wincing, and takes the two steps needed to get near Dorian again. Regarding the offerings he has brought, Victor smiles, leans in to press a kiss to Dorian’s pristine jaw.

“I will need to make more marks on you, now that you’ve wiped clean those I’ve made before,” he murmurs.

“If only it were so selective. I think that I would like to keep yours on me for as long as I can.”

Dorian allows his eyes to slip closed as he turns his cheek against Victor’s own. Nuzzling gently, plate held aside to allow their bodies to press near, Dorian hums pleased as skilled fingers traces the curve of his spine and curl around his bottom. Victor’s lips trace his collarbone, seeking no more than simple contact, and Dorian’s lifts his hand to gently stroke his hair.

“Bath,” Dorian reminds him, bumping their hips lightly together. He grins wide and their noses bump as he steals a kiss, and then another. “And food. You’ll eat and rest if I’ve to tie you to the bed to make it happen. And God only knows what might occur once I’ve done that.”

“Libertine,” Victor sighs, and it’s fond, warm. He steps back to climb into the bath first, the water just too hot, granting them enough time to soak comfortably before the cooling water forces them to return to bed. He watches as Dorian sits opposite him, to begin, lazy as a cat, and sets the plate at a precarious balance to the curved corner of the tub.

The water smells sweet and eases the aching from Victor’s bones to which he had grown so accustomed that he had assumed it normal. He stretches, setting his feet on either side of Dorian’s hips, leaving himself open as he sinks further into the water and lets his knees rise up above the waterline, spread wide to press to the edges of the tub.

“I have missed the sounds of this house,” Victor murmurs after a moment, shifting the water with his hands and smiling as Dorian leans near with a piece of chocolate between his fingers to feed it to him. He obediently takes it, delights in tasting Dorian’s fingers before letting them slip free. “It breathes and suffers as we do.”

Dorian lifts his gaze, as if considering the place for the first time - he is, in a sense, through Victor’s eyes. Slender fingers dip beneath the water and rest against Victor’s ankle, and Dorian circles the bone with his thumb. “I should hope it does,” he finally says. “After all that it’s seen - the wars and upheaval, religious schisms and industry, the Great Fire.” Dorian’s voice trails off, and returns as he himself does, as if from a far-away distance. “It has earned every ache and moan in its brittle bones.”

He takes up an orange and slips his feet to rest beside Victor’s hips, legs tucked beneath his. The sweet, tart spray of the fruit as he works the skin off with his thumbnail dissolves the chill of winter, as bright and unlikely a thing as they both are in this place.

“It has been lonely without you,” Dorian tells him, setting aside the peel - spiralled off as a whole - and tearing free a slice to feed to Victor across the bath. “Left to my own devices, I lose track of - well, everything, I suppose. One begins to wonder, watching motes of dust, if one is not the same as they. Bits of molecules gliding whichever way the air moves, unnoticed and unminded.”

Victor savors the fruit, the only time he can eat it, fresh and unmarred, is here, with Dorian. He has little time to spend at market seeking out good produce, and less inclination. He eats when he remembers to, or when he is summoned by Sir Malcolm to the house and finds himself following that routine with the others.

“You were missed,” he murmurs. “Greatly. The first day anger fuelled me through my work. The second I felt desolate and exhausted. The third and fourth felt like decades in themselves. No matter what I did, I was cold.”

He lifts lights eyes to regard Dorian before him and smiles, ducking his head as though embarrassed by his own admission. Rarely, if ever, has he felt the need to seek out company regularly. His friends - and they are now, undoubtedly - are welcome when he sees them but Dorian is the only one he seeks for and misses. Truly misses.

Victor shifts, stroking his leg alongside Dorian’s, a deliberate slow rub, before he tilts his head back and rests in the water with a sigh, a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth.

The invitation, whether deliberate or unintentional, is taken. Water splashes softly against the edges of the tub as Dorian turns within it, drawing up his knees in the small space until he can rest his back against Victor’s chest. He pushes their cheeks together, his head to Victor’s temple. He watches as his doctor’s arm comes to rest across his stomach.

“You should be kinder to yourself,” Dorian suggests, feeding Victor another slice of orange, fingertips lingering against his lips.

“And what of you?” Victor asks with a curt laugh. “How long were you going to let your hand heal wrongly to spite me?”

“Until I grew tired of feeling spiteful,” Dorian grins. “Lucky for us both you came back before that happened.”

A hum, then, deliberate amusement, and Victor brings his hand up, cupped, to pour warm water over Dorian’s exposed chest, again and again, just a gentle thing before he spreads his palm over Dorian’s skin and rubs against it softly. Carefully, he draws his knees closer and cradles Dorian against him fully.

“Stubborn,” Victor mumbles, smiling when he feels his beautiful boy arch against him, rub back against his soft cock.

“Pot,” Dorian sighs, settling again. “Kettle.”

Victor threads his fingers with Dorian’s and parts his lips obediently for another piece of orange, eyes narrowed in pleasure as he watches Dorian carefully peel apart another piece for himself. It should not be this comfortable, this is like the calm before a storm, the eye of it, precisely. There is a lingering worry, a panic, that this is something dangerous, something that should not happen, and yet Victor would not move and leave if he could.

Not again.

The next slice is fed to Victor, but not from Dorian’s sticky-sweet fingers. Instead, he brings it nearly to his doctor’s mouth, then places it between his own teeth. Juice spills cool and fragrant down their chins as they kiss, Dorian smiling so wide he can hardly manage it, let alone when Victor brings a hand to Dorian’s hair to grip it gently.

The water sloshes as they move, senseless and exuberant writhing, twisting simply to feel the other’s sleek limbs and silken skin against their own. They are surrounded by darkness, dust and decay, decades upon decades disregarded and forgotten. And yet here, together, there is light, and though it is only the faint flickering of candles, it illuminates them both as if they were themselves gilded and brightly shining.

Their kiss breaks as Dorian laughs, nearly losing the remaining orange into the bath in their happy twining. Squinting at Victor in mild accusation, smile spread wide, Dorian shifts again to straddle Victor’s legs, knees against his hips. That is, until Victor raises his legs in response, knees above the water, and with a wrinkled nose and another laugh Dorian slides closer.

“You know there are kinder means to sate your need than the needle,” Dorian ventures. “I only mention it because it pains me to see your vessels so taxed by it, dearest.”

“Says the artist to the doctor.”

Dorian’s smile quirks wider, and he quiets Victor with another slice of orange. “We all have our medicines. I only mean that it may be a pleasant change to use your lungs rather than your arms. That’s what Coleridge used to do, you know.”

Victor raises his eyebrows and sets his hands soft against Dorian’s sides, stroking just beneath the water, enough to tickle Dorian into squirming closer.

“You’re corrupting me.”

“Hopefully for many years to come,” Dorian agrees, smile wide as he sets another piece of orange between his lips. “I think you will enjoy it.”

“Mm. I fear I might,” Victor counters, but he can’t bring himself to disagree, to deny Dorian this pleasure. He knows what opium does, how it should make one feel but he has never touched the pipe himself. Morphine was always closer, always soothing enough to still his hands.

He can tell himself it’s clinical, a treatment. Medication for a nervous disorder.

It becomes harder to justify with a pipe between one’s lips.

Dorian steals the last slice of orange for himself, its juices still sweet upon his tongue as he presses chest to chest with his doctor and kisses him deeply. Both are sated, both are relieved, not only of their seemingly ceaseless sexual drive but for want of the other. They are here. They are together.

“This is why you will always be fond of me,” Dorian decides, slipping his arms over Victor’s shoulders. “I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”

“Until you.”

“Do I make you brave, darling?” Dorian’s grin widens. “Or foolish?”

“Both, I would wager,” Victor murmurs, shifting to recline further in the tub, Dorian resting on him like a large housecat, contented and warm. They stay until the water starts to cool, until they are both breathing slowly, shifting when their eyes close for too long.

The water drains and they share a towel, soft kisses as hands seek to dry the other, to tickle and to touch. Then to bed, the plate taken with them and set to a side table for later perusal when either should wake. Beneath the sheets, they press as close as they can, legs tangled and chests together, hearts beating just out of time, almost pushing the other to keep up.

Both exhausted, both drained from their lack of contact, they are quiet now, but it doesn't matter. Not when they are here and together for the foreseeable future. Brave and foolish both, a man who makes the undead, and the boy who is undying.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“It would be music. Art. Poetry incarnate,” Dorian says. Their eyes meet, and Dorian’s shine bright with delight. “Tell me then that you still prefer your stoic darkness.”_

It is both an alarming reminder of the Gray house’s perpetual night and a tribute to their mutual exhaustion that neither wake until it’s nearly time for tea. Victor stirs first, jerking awake in surprise to not be in his own little bed, in his one-room flat, nor sprawled across the floor of his laboratory with a strap of leather around his arm. He blinks, squinting against the single sliver of light that cuts blinding between the curtains.

He no sooner manages to pull back the sheet than a warm, skinny arm wraps around him to slide him back to bed.

“Dorian,” Victor whispers, with as much relief as dismay as the beautiful man beside him makes a fussy sound. “Dorian, I need to -”

“Lay back down so I can lick you awake as I planned,” murmurs Dorian, muffled, into the pillow.

Victor shivers, the words enough to pull a blush quick to his cheeks, a chill through his body. It is such a simple thing, a casual word and yet Victor’s entire body feels alive from the very idea. He swallows. Hates that it is his body, now, that betrays him. Victor laughs, just a breath, and strokes Dorian’s hand with his own.

“Pretend this is a dream and let me up but a moment -”

“Plans long made should not be broken,” Dorian mumbles, and Victor laughs again, curling his fingers with Dorian’s and gently prying them free.

“Relief,” he begs. “And I will be your prisoner all the day you wish to keep me here.”

“Days,” Dorian clarifies, and Victor grins.

“Days,” he amends.

“If you’ve good aim, you might be able to hit the chamberpot from where you are.”

Victor’s lips part at the suggestion, turning to regard Dorian nuzzling closer. He grins and touches a kiss to Victor’s rump, then another, and -

“I am not so skilled as that,” Victor says, squirming if only to avoid stiffening more than he has. It will already hurt to piss.

“I promise not to look. Unless you wish me to look, and then I shall.”

“You are a terror, Dorian Gray.”

Before he can be snared again, Victor stands and pads quickly towards the bathroom. Dorian curls up tight and then splays long, pointing his toes and stretching his legs, positively feline. With his arm over his head, he watches sleepily as Victor disappears into the bathroom.

“Come back quickly,” he complains. “I already miss you.”

Victor snorts from the bathroom but doesn’t answer, relieving himself then running water to wash his face. The bags under his eyes are still substantial but he feels more rested than he has in days. He is more than happy to crawl back into bed, facing Dorian and sighing when he nuzzles against him like a sleepy cat, lips to Victor’s throat as his breathing eases again and they doze.

When he wakes next, Victor is on his stomach, head pillowed against a crooked arm and sheets heavy against his lower back, just keeping him decent should anyone see. Though no one would, who would find it indecent that he be so bare in bed.

He feels Dorian kiss his spine, lips pressed against every vertebra in turn, worshiping it and allowing his breath to spread hot against Victor’s back. At his tailbone, Dorian stops, nosing against the nub there before peeling down the sheets over the curve of Victor’s ass, baring him entirely to the cool dark room.

The doctor doesn’t move, though his eyes are open, watching slight shadows play on the wall behind the headboard. He is curious, remembering Dorian’s mumbled promise the first time they woke. He tenses his muscles a bit when Dorian’s lips brush over one cheek, then the other. Turning his head a little in the semblance of a sleepy nuzzle, Victor buries his face against his arm farther and bites against the sheets, pretending to be asleep just a moment more.

Slender fingers spread across his bottom, palms cupping them to gently spread. Dorian’s thumbs stroke softly inward, and at this, Victor nearly loses himself to his own game, scarcely able to restrain sounds of pleasure or protest at being so exposed. For a moment - nearly too long - Victor knows that Dorian is merely looking at him, studying him, taking in the sight of his most private place.

And then warm breath replaces the weight of Dorian’s gaze, a feather-soft sigh passed across his opening, still tender from the rough fucking the night before. It is apparent now, terribly apparent just how Dorian intends to wake him. _Lick_ he said, he told him he would, but Victor never imagined -

“ _Oh_ ,” Victor moans low into the pillow beneath him, as Dorian traces the tip of his tongue across him.

A grin infuses his voice as Dorian answers, “There you are.”

The first response is to curl up and get away from it, but Dorian holds Victor down with gentle pressure and clicks his tongue as though chastening him for moving. So Victor stops, heart hammering already and body aching to feel that tickling sensation again.

“Good morning,” Dorian hums, and presses his face between soft cheeks again to take another taste of his doctor.

The sounds Victor makes are humiliating, high and desperate little things as he squirms beneath Dorian’s touch, beneath his clever tongue. This is deviant, this is forbidden and the definition of sinful, and hell if Victor isn’t harder than he has ever been in his life right then, rubbing against the mattress as his legs spread helplessly for Dorian and he raises his hips.

“Stop,” he manages, breathless, eyes closed and cheeks burning, and he hopes Dorian hears it for the lie it is.

“Shall I?” Dorian asks, and even the sensation of his words passing breathy over Victor’s skin curls his hips and drives his cock into the mattress. But despite his question he touches again, a little circle this time, tracing the gathered skin that twitches tighter as Victor’s hands clench in turn.

“It isn’t,” Victor stammers, shaking his head. “It is improper.”

“Most wonderful things are,” Dorian agrees. “Declared so by those too ashamed to allow themselves the experience. And so I ask again,” he whispers, his lips brushing Victor’s opening as he speaks. “Shall I stop?”

Before Victor can draw breath to reply, Dorian flattens his tongue and licks firm between Victor’s spread cheeks.

It is shivers and heat all at once and Victor isn’t sure why his fingers feel like they’ve gone numb but he is certain he cannot feel the mattress beneath his hands. All he can feel, every sense that once worked without issue or incident, is now focused between his legs, the space where Dorian laves with his tongue almost lovingly and all Victor can do it moan, voice breaking, and drive his forehead into the bed to arch his back higher.

He is wanton for it, desperate for it, toes digging into the bed and spreading his legs, lifting his hips even higher, arching his back when Dorian gently sets a palm against it. He is entirely under Dorian’s control, every little lick and lap, every hum and breath against him, Victor is at his mercy, growing weaker and weaker, more and more needy.

“Don’t -” he manages, lips wide and eyes closed right. “Don’t - God - please -”

He can feel Dorian’s smile, pressed against flushed skin; he can hear it in his voice. “I wonder if all those so quick to praise your mind see your loveliness, too. Perhaps I am fortunate, sole spectator to a rare beauty.”

Victor tries to laugh at the absurdity of such a sentiment, from a renowned beauty, no less. He tries but he fails to make the sound into anything more than a keening moan as Dorian wraps his lips against him and sucks. Tonguing into him, the tip of his tongue penetrating past his lips and into his doctor, every wet, lurid sound that Dorian makes tugs Victor’s cock to greater stiffness. He ruts shamefully into the mattress, stopping only to push himself back harder to the damp heat that blossoms sweeter than any poppy beneath his skin.

As if in obeisance, Dorian snakes a hand down Victor’s inner thigh. Reaching between his legs, he milks his cock in time with every suck or lick against him, quick downward tugs as Victor’s hips rise higher. His knee slips against the sheets, scrabbling to bend his back deeper.

Keens turn to sobs and Victor shakes against the bed, flushed and cold and hot at once. He allows his voice to rise, to fill the rooms of the old house - no one will hear outside, and no one need hear but the man behind him, eating him out with such delight it brings tears to Victor’s eyes, sticking the lashes together.

“Dorian,” he gasps, one hand seeking back for him, as though to push him away, warn him, perhaps, stop him - again. He finds his hand briefly grasped and let go, before he is spread wider still and Dorian’s tongue plunges deep again, and Victor loses himself to shaking release.

Dorian palms around the pulsing head of Victor’s hapless cock, so marvelously and readily overwhelmed. Truly, his doctor is a delight, akin to an unlikely orchid that despite the savagery of the world around it still manages to produce a rare bloom, unseen in its private place, hidden from all who might pass by it unwitting. Sucking softening kisses against him, Dorian allows Victor reprieve and withdraws his cupped hand, rubbing the small of his back with the other as he sinks trembling into the mattress.

Stretching sleepily, entirely too pleased with himself, Dorian shifts his legs to either side of Victor’s own as his doctor’s breath hitches in laughing, weeping little noises. Cock standing stiff, Dorian strokes himself languidly, coating his length with Victor’s own release. The remainder he smears shining into Victor’s crevice, and taking himself in hand again, he aligns himself and rocks slowly inward.

Victor’s entire body shudders with the feeling of being stretched again, still unprepared but for the divine tonguing moments before. He lifts his hips as he can with Dorian straddling him and accommodates for the movement, a long groan pulled from him as Dorian settles in to the base, leaning over Victor where he trembles in bed.

“You undo me,” he mumbles into the sheets, and curls his arms inwards, pressing his face against his knuckles, the other arm loose at his side. His breath hitches with every slow and deliberate thrust, eyes still wet and lips slick and body sweaty from pleasure.

Dorian ducks his head and lets a lovely sound rise from his lips, ivory cheeks pinked to rose from the firmness of Victor’s body taking his own within and the acceptance of his admission. Victor’s still-warm semen slicks his own entrance as Dorian lays heavy over him, curling his arms beneath his doctor’s and clutching to his shoulders. He lets his kisses be clumsy, scattered with youthful eagerness along Victor’s neck. He nuzzles up into his hair and breathes him in as he rounds his spine and bucks his hips.

Shallow thrusts, quick snaps of movement flicking quick, already buried deep. Their bodies glide together, damp with shared sweat, Dorian’s stomach against the small of Victor’s back, sharp hips pounding relentless with want into the plush curve of his doctor’s ass.

“I will,” Dorian whispers. “Undo you and make you whole again so that I can undo you anew, over and over.”

Victor just groans, smile wide and languid, body still lax from having Dorian’s tongue inside him. He arches up to meet every thrust against him but does little more than that, allowing Dorian to use him for his pleasure as he deems fit.

He splays his fingers and finds Dorian’s hand against his own, pressing his palm gently to the back of Victor’s hand. He turns his head enough to catch Dorian’s lips against the corner of his mouth. It is intimate, somehow, this closeness and sharing of smiles and breath even as Dorian fucks him into the bed.

Never had Victor though that he would find himself in such a place and such a position, beneath a man and presenting himself to him, enjoying the pleasure given him as he submits. Never had he imagined that he would want this with anyone; it is enough that he sees his creations, whether they live or not, and cares for them. Always enough for him.

Until Dorian Gray. Until his clever mouth and perfect teeth and teasing smile. Until he had wheedled into Victor’s mind and refused to leave, and slowly, deliberately, made his way to Victor’s heart next.

Dorian lets his hand be held. He lets his cock be squeezed by deliberate clenching. He lets his heart trip faster and his voice ache higher, so that Victor can not just know but feel what he does to Dorian in turn. His free hand clasps Victor’s jaw and turns him a little further. Their mouths press corner to corner, so that there too they might be joined. Dorian has had his share of virgins; he has had his share of men who did not know how desperately they’ve needed a firm fucking.

Victor is both of those things, and so much more.

His innocence is intoxicating, far beyond the depravity of plucking flowers freshly blooming. Victor possesses knowledge but not experience; a desire to know all things intimately that could not be expressed without the careful hand of one who has, in fact, known all things intimate. Dorian never might have guessed when he first playfully drew Victor’s finger between his lips that his doctor would hurtle headlong into such things.

But he had hoped.

And sometimes that’s all the faith one needs for magic.

“May I,” Dorian whispers, the words cut jagged by the quickened breaths that pant in time with the relentless rocking of his hips.

Victor makes a questioning sound, lips parted for the brush of Dorian’s own. “May you -”

“Ask me,” comes the raw plea. “Ask me to - inside you -”

Vic grins, a laugh vibrating through his bones to Dorian’s as he curls his arms beneath himself and arches his back deeper, turning his head against the pillow and blushing darker at the thought of being so blatantly needy.

But he is.

And Dorian knows, and Victor knows, and why not? Why not when they both get such joy from this and each other?

“Come in me,” he breathes, biting his lip and keeping his eyes closed as Dorian groans against him, shivers, claws his hands in the sheets. “Fill me up.”

Dorian cries out a curse as he does. Burying himself deep, toes bent against the mattress to push harder, further, a matter of centimeters but it matters. It matters when Victor clutches Dorian’s hand tighter and groans low. It matters when the sheets skid beneath their scrabbling bodies and Dorian’s release spasms in thick waves through them both. It matters when erratic thrusts soften and he finds himself milked almost painfully dry not only because Dorian wants to lay claim to this but because Victor wants to be claimed.

He scrapes his teeth against Victor’s shoulder and moans the last of his orgasm through a bruising ring of red left by his bite, his doctor’s skin scratched raw when Dorian’s fingernails dug to hold him in place.

Blood rushing quick enough to drown out any thoughts to a droning buzz, Dorian laughs and hardly hears himself to do so. He lets his toes uncurl and his body grow heavy beneath the wonderful weight of their understanding, sliding his arms free only to grasp Victor around his belly and roll to his side, dragging his doctor with him. Languid kisses replace the sharp snare of his teeth.

“You make me wonder,” he whispers, “what I have done right, in lifetimes of unfathomable sin, to have you as my own.”

Victor just hums, stretching to get the kinks out of his muscles with soft clicks and a long groan before he settles.

“You will find me awful,” he mumbles. “I read too late into the night, I get obsessed. I forget to eat or sleep for days on end. I have theories that no scientists wish to discuss with me, Thoughts far too dire to work within the medical community. I do not drink -”

“You do,” Dorian laughs.

“I don’t usually drink,” Victor corrects, determined to list all of his shortcomings at once so that later they are not presented as lies hidden. He turns in Dorian’s arms and meets his raised eyebrows and patient smile with an attempted frown. “I’m grumpy, I’m stubborn. You will find me rather a chore.”

“A challenge, perhaps,” Dorian grins. He is not swayed by this list of shortcomings. There is not one he finds less than fascinating, let alone distasteful. He slides a leg over Victor’s hip, an arm across his middle, and nestles closer. Their noses brush together, near enough that when he speaks, their lips touch, too. “You are driven. Passionate. Stubborn, yes, but who isn’t when it comes to defense of what matters to them? If pride is your greatest sin, dearest, then I will hardly worry.”

Victor snorts, brow creased as he rests his cheek against Dorian’s hair. “You say so now.”

“I do. And what of me? Name a sin and I could claim it as my own. Youthful indiscretions in a youth that is never-ending. I suppose I’ve not committed simony, nor sold religious indulgences, so at least those bolgias of the inferno are barred to me, but -”

Dorian frowns a little now, too, in thought.

“I am capricious. Insatiable and selfish. Whereas you turn to asceticism to hone your focus, I have no focus but my own excesses. You will tire of my hedonism. _I_ tire of it.”

“You told me that pleasure is something you will never tire of, how it is always different from person to person, new experiences and ideas and sensations.” Victor smiles, mischievous, and lifts an eyebrow. “Did you lie?”

Dorian’s eyes narrow a little, though his own smile spreads. “I’m flattered you listen so closely.”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“Obfuscation is an art.”

“And it provides thin comfort to know you feel that way,” Victor observes, bringing a hand around to Dorian’s hair and smoothing it back from his eyes. At this, Dorian relents, nuzzling into his doctor’s palm, calloused but always careful.

“It is the exhaustion of pleasure that leads one to seek new forms of it. Then, in discovery, the thrill is renewed. It is akin to carrying a flame from candle to candle - as one wick burns low, the next is caught before the first extinguishes itself.”

Dorian shifts to his back, untangling their limbs to do so, resting a hand against his stomach and his other arm across his brow. “Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose, but what occurs when the purpose itself is inherently unstable?”

Victor watches him, the way Dorian spreads himself and settles - more than once, he would wager, an artist’s model, more than once, he would guarantee, an artist’s muse in bed and outside of it. He is used to this presentation, this blatant showiness of himself. He is used to the sound of his own voice, and amused as Victor is by the notion, it is also incredibly endearing to him.

“I commend your verbosity,” Victor says at last, smiling as Dorian snorts. “And offer a reminder that once in a while candles need not be lit.”

He blinks, and though his lips part, there is an instant of silence. Dorian Gray, in a rare moment of genuine surprise, is speechless. It isn’t the supposition so much as the fact that it’s being said to him at all, and he regards Victor with a curious wonder, nearing disbelief that his mild-mannered and shy doctor would be so bold.

He is wonderful.

And so Dorian laughs. He tries to muffle the lovely lilting noise behind his arm but it does little good, and he rolls to his belly to lay side by side against Victor once more. Tucking his arms beneath his cheeks, blooming bright as roses, pleasure again paints itself across Dorian’s features.

“You say so now,” Dorian echoes, grinning. “You who has only just come into the light. Give yourself another twenty minutes and you’ll be begging for it again.”

Victor’s eyes narrow but he doesn’t argue, says nothing at all, because he remembers just the phantom touches against his skin, just the ghost of a memory of that explosively good sensation. He can feel the slick mess between his legs, even now, and presses his thighs together tighter as though it might help.

He will need a bath.

They both will.

“You would have me beg?” He asks, amused.

Dorian doesn’t move, but it’s a conspicuous stillness. He is nearly resonant with the words, as a violin remains static even as a plucked string hums throughout its frame. Slowly, he licks his lower lip between his teeth, and a smile draws up the muscles beneath his eyes.

“Would I have you beg?” Dorian repeats, softly.

Victor recalls the feral cats he has seen toy with broken-winged birds not for sustenance but for the sheer delight that comes in feeling their struggle. Dorian unfurls upward, knees splayed as he bows into a long stretch before draping himself across Victor, linen-soft limbs twining over him. He traces the stern curve of Victor’s jaw with his fingertips, studying every flicker of curiosity that sparks in his doctor’s expression.

“To see you war between your pride and your desires,” Dorian muses, whispering. “To see you go to your knees despite yourself - not only because I ask it from you, but because in your very heart you ache for it. To hear you plead, your hair held between my fingers and your lips against my thigh, for what you know I am incapable of withholding from you, anyway.”

He leans enough to close their lips together, spreading them wide in turn and touching his tongue to Victor’s teeth before he grins.

“It would be music. Art. Poetry incarnate,” Dorian says. Their eyes meet, and Dorian’s shine bright with delight. “Tell me then that you still prefer your stoic darkness.”

Victor exhales all at once, and as he does, Dorian sweeps him into a deeper kiss, fingers pushing into his hair and bodies coiling together. His laugh bubbles between them and a sweet nuzzle against Victor’s cheek breaks his bewitching.

“You needn’t beg,” smiles Dorian. “Though you certainly can if you like.”

Victor does not as quickly recover. Behind his eyes he sees Dorian's ballroom, he sees himself kneeling before him. He can feel his own displeasure at the thought, and a stirring in his belly all at once.

He does not want to admit that he may want to beg.

He knows Dorian knows.

So instead, Victor arches to kiss beneath Dorian's jaw, and proposes a counter offer.

"Would you beg for me?" 

Dorian rests an arm around Victor’s wide shoulders, tilting his head upward to encourage further kisses. Each one widens his smile a little more, until his eyes drift closed, lashes settled long against his cheeks.

“With artful words and physical poetry,” he murmurs. His fingernails scrape softly stroking through Victor’s hair, creating eddies of goosebumps in his wake. “I would bend for you. Held roughly across a table, pleading to feel you fill me. On my knees, hobbled with leather straps to keep me there. I would let you hear my voice crack. If you need my pleas, my worship, my yielding, to know how deeply you intoxicate me, you will have it.”

His eyes open, watching the reverence and intoxication that keeps Victor’s lips parted and his cheeks pinked with the flow of too-fast blood.

“I have thought of it, you know. The secret strength hidden in your lean muscles, and how wonderfully and cruelly you could use them against me. I have imagined, often, how the subjugation of all that I am would darken into your eyes with godlike power and fatten your cock to dripping.”

He wraps his hand against the back of Victor’s neck. Mischievous, eyes drinking up the light into inky blackness but for pinpricks of candlelight, Dorian sighs against his lips.

“I would beg you to let me lick it from the floor, Victor Frankenstein.”

Victor curses, just a soft thing, and laughs, the only response his body supplies for such an overwhelming feeling of delight and nervousness at once. He hasn’t the bearing to control another this way, let alone _Dorian Gray_ , but the thought alone, of this beautiful boy dishevelled and on his knees before him -

He strokes Dorian's face and smiles, eyes narrowed in delight, before swallowing and turning his head away, his blush having seeped down his neck now.

They should get up, dress, eat. He should go back to work. Something. He fears the restless and endless tedium of the silence in the house will drive his mind to exhaustion as it attempts to entertain itself.

He wishes he had the time, suddenly, as Dorian does.

As if the strange ties that bind them were pulled taut, a crease softly strains Dorian’s brow as he watches his doctor’s posture shift. His hand settles against Dorian’s neck. His eyes seek a middle distance, not towards Dorian but into his own thoughts. And Dorian thus finds himself surprised by the rare sensation of dismay. At the promise of all manner of lurid and illicit games they might play, Victor is distracted.

Perhaps disinterested.

Dorian’s tongue clicks against his lips as he parts them. 

“Perhaps I overspoke,” he says simply, affecting a gentle smile. Letting his fingers follow the slender line of Victor’s arm, Dorian stretches his legs long and tugs himself to the edge of the bed and off, swaying with a pleasant sort of exhaustion. “Does your work require you? Or some other scholarly obligation?”

Victor blinks, awaking as though from a stupor, and watches Dorian, beautiful and naked before him, stretching his entire form for Victor to see. As though he could forget it, as though anything could pull him from it now.

He swings his own legs over the side of the bed and reaches to snare Dorian around the waist, tugging him back and kissing the base of his spine.

"My imagination grew cluttered with such beautiful things filling it," he replies, and it is earnest, apologetic, and he can feel Dorian relax incrementally against him. Victor grins suddenly, nuzzles the little dimples just where the cleft of Dorian's ass starts. "I had never imagined you would allow me such things. I could go as far as to say I am honored."

Dorian’s nose wrinkles as his grin returns, the settling cold driven away again by the warmth of Victor’s words. He twists just enough to look down his back towards Victor, and settle a hand fondly in his hair. Strong arms curl around his middle and Dorian leans back into him a bit more.

“I find my imagination entirely lacking,” he says, “insofar as what I would not allow you. I wonder if there is ought at all that I could deny you, dearest.”

Victor’s laugh is heat against his skin and Dorian shivers, ruffling ruddy-cheeked and resplendent beneath the attentions.

“I lied,” Dorian says.

“Oh?”

“I’ve thought of something I will deny you.” Dorian turns to face him, and bearing Victor back, draws up lean legs to either side of him, straddling his lap. He cups his doctor’s cheeks in his palms and kisses him, only once. “I will not allow you to leave here without taking breakfast with me, nevermind that it’s nearly night again. I know you won’t eat at all if I let you return to work without.”

Victor smiles, presses his lips to Dorian’s for a lingering kiss.

"I was hoping -” He bites his lip, amused, and lets the silence hold. "That you would invite me for dinner as well."


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Victor hadn’t been hard to find. A doctor of renown beyond his years, physician and scientist both, treating common ailments and exploring theories only alluded to in his conversations with Dorian. Granted, many of those conversations took place in whispers beneath the sheets, coaxed free beneath a warm mouth and hot hands, so Dorian can hardly fault Victor for not discerning more. There’s a time and place for everything._
> 
> _It just so happens that Dorian had to make the time now, and the place of his own devising._

In the centuries that Dorian has lived here, he’s learned that London is less a big city and more a conglomeration of very small ones. Each neighborhood is distinct, their boundaries as clear to him by now as if they were fenced. Now and then a build crumbles, a new one goes up. Streets shift in increments or reroute themselves like rivers to circumvent new obstacles. But these changes are miniscule compared to the decades of watching London foment into its current state, ravaged by wars and fires, evolving from wide streets and greenways into smokestacks of industry belching black, and narrow-natured tenements teetering precarious.

Dorian knows that Westminster smells more of horses than their shit.

He knows that Smithfield smells more like shit than horses.

He knows that the first Hebrew he hears signals his first strides into the East End.

And he knows that the first coarse Irish brogue that abrades his ears means he’s in Whitechapel, freshly filled again with another deluge of residents from elsewhere.

Dorian stands at the corner of Wells and Cable, immersed by a ceaseless flow of bodies bustling to their night work. A wind carries off the docks, a minor respite even as it chills him. He tugs his lilac scarf a little tighter, making note of the sharp gazes that linger on him a moment too long, with a little too much interest. Dorian’s not bothered to dress down - especially not considering his intention to flush out the absentee Dr. Frankenstein and sodomize him thoroughly - but he wonders, absently, if he’ll be mugged.

Dorian allows a moment to be charmed by the thought of showing up at Victor’s doorstep cradling a savage cut in his belly, to be repaired by the doctor’s skilled fingers.

But! Were Dorian that young doctor, particularly clever, and given to distasteful flights of fancy rejected by the stodgier members of his medical circles, where would he live? More to the point, if his theories developed by way of dissection - morally taboo at best, illegal besides - where might he find his muses, cold and stiff as they are?

The idea of it - Victor Frankenstein uprooting bodies as if he were a common corpse-thief - makes Dorian laugh, and it draws several eyes towards him.

Not in the tenements. At least, not in the tenements pressed tight between other tenements. Dorian carries onward down Cable Street. There are churches here, all in a row with their attendant cemeteries, Scandinavian in form and purpose. Victor would appreciate the architecture, Dorian imagines, compared to clapboard, and the barrier they provide from the docks themselves. The Danish church at Wellclose Square with its multi-tiered cupola. The Swedish one, once bright red brick, dulled now by soot. And even were Victor not slinging around remains himself - an unlikely thing despite the glimmers of strength Dorian has felt as he’s pinned him to the mattress - this location would make the delivery of such parcels far simpler, considering the lawless environs surrounding.

More looks and more sensations of being deliberately watched by curious eyes and greedy eyes and hungry eyes. Dorian is used to all of them, knows how to preen a certain way to appeal to them all, fluid in his transformation from one to the other to the other.

He walks on. The looks follow.

The address of his beloved doctor had come to him through careful coercion and curious questioning. He hadn’t asked Victor himself, of course he wouldn’t, the man would hardly answer. There was a reason, beyond Dorian himself, that Victor enjoys spending time in the enormous house. Space. Fresh - enough - air. Food and quiet, uninterrupted by the inevitable white buzz of noise that comes with human beings living in close proximity.

Onwards to St. Katharine’s Docks and the flats that line them. He knows the number and he knows the house but Dorian takes his time to let the atmosphere seep into his bones and make a home there, as Victor has.

The night air has settled cold and thick across the docks, still alive and burning gaslight as ships are loaded and unloaded, over and over. Dorian can feel the fog settling wet through his overcoat and jacket, his breath adding to the mist in billows of grey. A sailor calls to him, a filthy proposition and a grab to his own groin. Dorian returns only a smile, charmed by the uncouth beckoning.

Victor hadn’t been hard to find. A doctor of renown beyond his years, physician and scientist both, treating common ailments and exploring theories only alluded to in his conversations with Dorian. Granted, many of those conversations took place in whispers beneath the sheets, coaxed free beneath a warm mouth and hot hands, so Dorian can hardly fault Victor for not discerning more. There’s a time and place for everything.

It just so happens that Dorian had to make the time now, and the place of his own devising.

There are no names beside the door of the ramshackle building, old wood curling from its sides, bent by time and salt air. It makes sense, he supposes. Families live several apiece to the rooms in places like this, sleeping wherever there’s space enough to curl. The door aches against rusted hinges as it opens, and Dorian coughs, unexpected, at the smell within. It isn’t unpleasant, so much as overwhelming. Gas and foreign foods, burning coal and humanity packed too tightly.

With gloved hand against the splintering banister, Dorian makes his way to the third floor and is delighted to discover a little slip of paper pasted beside the second door he checks.

_V. Frankenstein, Doctor_

God, he’s wonderful.

Three knocks, two in quick succession, and then the third, and Dorian steps back, straightening his shoulders and lifting his chin.

There is no sound beyond the door for a long time, nothing at all, not even a breath, and then the sound of heavy items being shifted, quick footsteps gradually slowing to polite briskness as they near the door. When it opens, Victor stands before him flushed and surprised and entirely beautiful.

He swallows.

Dorian grins.

“Doctor, I find myself tormented by a cruel ailment.”

Victor’s breath leaves him quickly in a soft laugh and he brings a hand to his lips to rub against them.

“You look very well,” he counters.

“Looks are often deceptive. You see, I find myself bereft.”

“Bereft?”

“A state of inconsolable grief,” Dorian says, eyes drawn up in pleasure and his smile wide. “Someone very dear to me has gone missing and I fear for the state of my heart, that hardly seems to beat at all without him. Have you a diagnosis for this malady, or treatment? You came highly recommended.”

Another breathless laugh, and Dorian delights in knowing he can make this man nervous, can turn the stoic frown and biting sarcasm into softer things and gentle things. Victor composes himself again, hands behind his back before he steps aside and gestures with one clean palm for Dorian to enter.

“I hear the treatment is most effective when immediately administered,” he says. “Such a thing cannot go unchecked for too long.”

He closes the door and immediately pins Dorian against it, hands in his lapels, lips against those that part so willingly for him. The kiss is softer than the snaring of it would suggest, and Victor licks his lip into his mouth after and nuzzles against the beautiful man before him.

“You fool. What are you doing here, dressed as you are? You could have been skinned for your boots alone.”

Dorian arcs a brow and glances downward towards the sleek leather boots, knee high and shining black, his tight trousers tucked within. “They are nice, aren’t they?”

“You’re mad.”

“Desperate,” Dorian corrects him, leaning in to curl a kiss against Victor’s throat. He rocks against him and laughs as Victor pushes him harder to the door. “I made a game of it, estimating which would be the one to finally try a mugging.”

“And?”

“None at all,” he says. “What a waste of an exciting opportunity for us all.” Victor shakes his head, eyes wide but smiling still, and his lips part as Dorian strokes a gloved thumb across them. “You aren’t angry? I thought you might be, interrupted at your work. I came to the conclusion that if this mistress of yours is going to keep you from me, I should at least take time to know her nature - see what sway she holds over you.”

“I don’t -” Victor takes a breath, allows his hands to spread gentle against Dorian’s ridiculous brocade vest, tracing the curls and patterns embroidered on it. “I am a slave to the whore that is my work,” he amends, clicking the consonants and smiling when Dorian’s grin spreads wider. “I pay her in time and sleep and get nought in return but frustration.”

“As any whore will leave you.”

Victor draws a hand through Dorian’s hair and snares it gently, enough to see his eyes hood and pupils widen, enough that Dorian’s lips part and he tilts his head to bare his neck in submissive delight.

“Have you come to rescue me from her?”

Dorian grins, preening, and arches up to his toes as Victor pulls away Dorian’s scarf, and sets his mouth to his throat. His kisses are crushingly soft, delicate as moth wings fluttering, each one enough to shiver goosebumps over Dorian’s skin. He pulls off his gloves, tossing them unceremoniously to the floor, and sighs as Victor’s hair threads sleek between his fingers.

“To pull you away tooth and nail if need be,” Dorian confesses. “To pin you down and hold you, and make you mine again.”

“I have been,” Victor says. “I am.”

A moan snaps free from Dorian as Victor’s lips give way to a scrape of teeth, wonderfully possessive. It is one thing to feel wanted, desired and appreciated. It is another entirely to be needed as much as sleep or sustenance or air itself. Dorian curves himself from the door, enough to make his own need known, pressing a stiff ridge against Victor’s thigh and meeting his gaze, dark-eyed.

“Prove it.”

A soft sound, almost helpless, before strong arms snare beneath Dorian’s thighs and hoist him up, shoving his shoulders up against the door as Victor kisses his throat, eyes closed and expression entirely blissful. He has missed him, this proud and eloquent and elegant eternally young man who holds his heart and mind entirely in thrall. He is exquisite. He is a mystery.

He forgets, for a moment, that his flat is a mess, too small too cramped too over-full with books and articles and bags upon bags of strange equipment.

And that’s saying nothing for the back room he had bought out from the landlord two summers before.

He forgets, for a moment, that they are in a place with people nearby. He forgets because it doesn’t matter, because in his arms is a man he willingly gives himself to, often, a man who can draw from Victor sounds that no one and nothing else ever could. A man he loves.

Careful to keep them balanced, knowing his room blind, by feel and step alone, he carries Dorian to the tiny bed they will now inevitably share, catching his lips when Dorian’s fingers seek cool over Victor’s skin and tug his hair. Dorian laughs, winsome as a school boy, when Victor lays him down with himself atop. Truly, there's no other place for him to be. The bed is shoved against the wall, room enough for two only if they were to lay pressed face to face. Dorian turns his face into the flattened pillow and breathes in deep the scent of his doctor, stretching until his boots creak, toes pointed.

"It's no wonder now that you sleep coiled so small," Dorian muses, lifting himself enough for Victor's firm hands to pull his overcoat down from his shoulders and out from beneath. "I thought perhaps I kicked in my sleep."

"You roam," Victor tells him. "Or your hands do, at any rate."

With a grin, Dorian watches as Victor kneels between his spread legs. Skilled fingers work open the buttons of his jacket and the waistcoat beneath, luxurious layers of expensive fabrics. It takes work to bare him and Dorian is pleased by that. It conveys into him the sensation of flowering, petals peeling back to bare his fertile and intoxicating center.

"Look at you," Dorian whispers, catching Victor's hands as they reach for his cravat, sooty grey. "In your beautiful squalor. How could my hands not seek you out even in sleep?" With a slow twist of his hips, thighs held spread, Dorian drags a hungry kiss against Victor's palm. He traces the tip of his tongue up his slender forefinger, reveling in the acrid burn of formaldehyde and steel tools that lingers on his skin. With a smile in his eyes, Dorian wraps his lips around and sucks.

Victor shivers, relaxing his grip on Dorian entirely to allow himself to feel this particular, familiar and well-sought sensation. He knows his fingers must taste awful, that he should have cleaned up, the house and himself, but Dorian had never called. He never calls. Dorian just shows up, always welcome and missed but never announced, like a ghost of a memory or something much more dire. Victor loves him more than he can say. He traces a second finger over bowed lips and laughs when it, too, is obediently taken against a velvet-warm tongue.

“You are terrible,” Victor sighs, ducking to nuzzle against Dorian and catch his lips in a kiss when his fingers are released. “Invading my mind when I should be working. Leaving me to remember the feeling of your tongue between my legs, thrusting in and pulling such pleasure from me I feel fit to burst.”

“Is that a request?” Dorian asks, forcing his smile to a somber look, though it lingers in his eyes. “Is this how you treat all your guests?”

“No,” Victor answers, quickly. “Yes,” he says instead, just as fast. He loses himself to a laugh, shaking his head. “Yes and no, in that order.”

“Is it wise?” Sitting up slowly, Dorian shrugs off his opened jacket, his waistcoat. His shirt follows and all are tossed careless to the floor, which Victor watches in mild horror as little dustballs settle back atop them.

“Is it -”

“Wise,” Dorian says again, his hands set to Victor’s vest in turn, and words hot against his jaw. “To indulge in something that compromises you so entirely. I would hate to keep you from your work, of course, it would be unthinkable.” He sucks a kiss against the center of Victor’s throat, relenting only when it jerks in a hard swallow against his tongue.

“I can hardly concentrate on work when I am away from you,” Victor points out, letting his jaw go slack as Dorian continues to kiss his way down the doctor’s body, baring him button by button. “Attempting to while you are here would be detrimental -”

“To?”

“My work,” Victor whispers, laughing as he spreads his arms and allows the shirt to be pulled from him. “Wasteful of your attention.”

Victor goes when Dorian snares him and switches their position, acrobatic, considering the tiny space they have to work with. And Victor lets him, entirely relents to him as Dorian ducks his head to plant devouring kisses against his neck and down his collarbone. He lingers over a nipple, already peaked despite the heat billowing from the fat-bellied stove a few meters away. Just breath, just a sigh, but Victor is sensitive and Dorian revels in his inexperience, the exploration and newness that overwhelms his doctor and him in turn.

Through thin walls, Dorian is certain the overstuffed apartments around them hear Victor’s moan as Dorian closes his lips to suckle firm against sensitive skin. He presses his teeth together just enough to hear Victor hiss in pain and pleasure both before moving lower still. Pale swaths of hair tickle his nose and dampen beneath his mouth as Dorian marks a path lower, down the narrowing trail to the top his trousers.

“I question a host who makes their guests work for them,” Dorian says, teasing, before Victor scrambles to undo himself. Bare beneath, his cock bounces full and heavy against his belly, and with Victor’s pants pulled only low enough to allow its freedom, Dorian swallows him whole.

God it feels good.

God _he_ feels good.

Victor has weeks ago stopped attempting to explain this connection and addiction, he drives himself mad thinking about it, understanding the chemical compounds and their toxicity when imbibed alone and in large amounts. And yet he lives, with them all flowing freely through his system, speeding his heart and filling his lungs.

He bites hard against his knuckle to keep quiet and trembles beneath Dorian’s clever mouth.

Full lips bend to meet the curves of his cock, wrapping so tight that the barest draw against sensitive skin spirals up into his belly and clenches it. Dorian’s tongue works in waves, languid pulses in time with his heart - his own, not Victor’s unwieldy and stuttering thing. Each stroke rubs his cockhead against the roof of Dorian’s mouth, the ridges there tangible where his foreskin slides back enough to bare the tip.

He bobs his head slowly, languid, unyielding to the frantic rush that Victor sings with, that pushed Dorian back so hard against the door. He will take his time with this, with Victor, with everything between them. What has he but time to savor every twitch inside his mouth, every muscle spasm that jerks Victor’s thighs against his cheeks? Dorian lifts a hand to grasp the base of Victor’s cock and squeeze what his mouth does not as he pulls back to suckle just the head, lips tucked beneath the corona.

Dorian lifts his eyes, long lashes draped low, and twists his tongue beneath Victor’s foreskin with a noisy suck.

And Victor moans. As much as he wants to stop it, to keep it pressed behind his lips, he cannot. Not with Dorian so lovingly sucking him, so determined to have him feel pleasure enough to white his entire mind out. His neighbours have heard worse, he is certain, and yet he cannot bring himself to drop his hand and allow his voice free as he does in Dorian’s home.

“Fuck,” he sighs, dropping his hand to tangle in Dorian’s hair, to clench in it, to tug it until the young man hums against him and Victor loses his voice entirely on a hitched little gasp of need.

It has not been long, he is sure, certainly not long enough to warrant such a desperate and aching need for the other to be close again. Certainly he is losing his mind, too much work and too little rest, and not at all the fact that Dorian enjoyed peppering his chest with kisses in the mornings, or nuzzling him with soft words at night. Not that at all. Not him.

“Dorian -”

He lets Victor’s cock pop free from his lips, wrist bending as he curls his fist upward around him. “Again,” he whispers, meeting Victor’s eyes with his own wickedness made transparent in narrowed eyes.

“Dorian,” Victor whispers, or tries to, but his voice cracks as Dorian strokes him harder. Not faster, no, Dorian wants him to last as long as possible, but squeezing firm around base and head, fingers moving sleek across velvet-soft skin.

“Again.”

Victor jerks, heat pooling in his belly and dripping clear down Dorian’s fingers. It had humiliated him how much he leaked when they just touched, did little more, but he had found quickly that Dorian rather enjoyed him that way. The doctor drops his head back against the pillow and an arm over his eyes and laughs, helpless.

“ _Dorian, please_ ,” he manages, soft, barely voiced but his voice breaking nonetheless. He trembles when Dorian seeks to slip his pants lower, rests untouched for the time it takes Dorian to bare him, and himself, before returning to bed. “Unconscionable libertine, touch me.”

“Why?”

“Because I missed you,” Victor laughs, lips parting on heaving gasps when Dorian seeks further down between his legs, circling his hole. “Because I love you. Because I want you.”

The words sing to Dorian, a symphony for his ears alone, heard by no other. They resonate and they stir whatever soul yet remains within him, its ragged tatters uplifted by the springtime sweetness of Victor’s newfound need. It is Dorian’s voice that joins the chorus, high and lissome, a single note plucked from aged strings still rich in their offering.

He has played with others, in Victor’s absence, sought out highbrow dalliances and lowbrow fucks, and all have left him wanting. Sent away at Dorian’s earliest convenience, disallowed to join him in his bed. His floor, perhaps the chaise, but then gone as quickly as he satisfied himself. In truth, it had been no satisfaction at all, and left him wanting and sticky as soon as swift animal release was found.

It is Victor who shakes the dust from his heart. It is Victor who chases Dorian’s shadows into corners and stops their spread. It is Victor who Dorian wants more than any other, the rarest bloom he has found in any memory yet afforded to him.

And it is Victor that he has.

His for the cultivation, and his for the plucking.

Dorian splays his knees wide as the bed allows behind him, and holds parted pale thighs. He hooks his hands beneath Victor’s knees and curves his hips forward, to whisper sweet devotion against that sinful place that he adores.

“God, how I’ve missed you, dearest.”

Victor barely has time to breathe before Dorian licks him, deliberate and catlike, practiced and delighting in the sensations this draws from Victor every time. As Dorian himself unfurls for Victor’s fingers, his lips, his tongue, against his nipples, so Victor does for Dorian’s face between his thighs.

One hand drops to cover Victor’s face, flushed bright, as the other sinks into Dorian’s hair once more and encourages him closer.

“Three days,” Victor whispers, shuddering in pleasure. “Three nights. We are incorrigible.”

Dorian draws a rough suck against tender skin as he parts enough to pant. “Has it been so long? Unconscionable. Never again, Victor Frankenstein.”

The gentle scolding is met with a laugh that gives way to a rapturous groan. Dorian spreads his tongue wide. He stiffens it to press inside. Feeling Victor’s muscles yield, Dorian surrounds that taut opening with his lips to suck moaning against him. Victor’s hips jerk upward, nearly enough to unseat Dorian, but instead he holds him there, arched onto his shoulders.

Down the expanse of Victor’s body, Dorian watches the way every fiber of him responds to this. His cock joins to his stomach with thick webs of clear fluid, enough that it beads and spills down his side. Dorian swears he can see Victor’s heart hurtling itself against his ribs, as his doctor pants in aching whimpers against his own spread fingers, cheeks burning hot.

His teeth are gritted, eyes closed tight, and every breath drawn from Victor’s aching lungs is voiced, if barely. This always undoes him, always brings him crashing into his pleasure as though plunging into a freezing lake. It is excruciating and perfect in its speed and power.

Victor manages Dorian’s name again, manages another weak attempt to shove Dorian away, and then he stops trying. It is inevitable, the surge of pleasure within him, the heat that pools after, the feeling of Dorian penetrating him, pushing deep and driving pleasure from him again and again until Victor is exhausted, and Dorian barely shifting himself.

And yet he still wakes first. Still regains his strength first. Exquisite inexplicable creature.

Victor arches his hips over and over against Dorian’s mouth, against his tongue, uncaring, now, for who listens and who hears when Victor shoves his hands, both, flat against the wall behind him and levers himself from there.

Dorian grips his legs harder, fingernails burning crescents that will be left red as blood against snow long after they’re finished. Though are they ever, truly? When seemingly a force greater than themselves collides them together in explosive heat, again and again, insurmountable.

Dorian digs his nails deeper, and leaves scarlet lines in their wake.

Breathless, he drops Victor’s hips to the bed and with the back of his hand, wipes streaks of glistening saliva from his chin. He spits curt - uncouth - into his hand and grasps his own aching cock, slicking it quick enough that Victor hardly has time to moan before Dorian is over him, against him, pushing inside of him with a moan.

Victor’s arms shake as Dorian spears him hard, forcing past the barrier of his entrance and burying himself so deep that Victor can’t moan, can’t find purchase enough in his own shuddering lungs to make sound. Only an airless gasp parts his lips, eyes wide towards the immortal beauty above him, before his mouth is sundered into a kiss.

Someone knocks against the wall and yells something unintelligible and Victor laughs, head back and neck arched in a beautiful curve for Dorian to kiss as they fuck hard enough that the bed squeaks on rusting springs, bangs back against the wall as hard as the neighbour complaining about it.

It is good. It is freeing and ridiculous and Victor’s heart could jump from his throat for the pleasure of it. He thinks of poets and their descriptions of whirlwind love. He thinks of chemicals. He thinks of swirling smoke and fresh strawberries from Spain.

His legs snare harder around Dorian’s lithe body and with a low groan, Victor allows himself to come, dropping one hand, then the other to scratch down Dorian’s back until he near-mewls from it, delighted by the pain.

“Dearest,” Dorian whispers, his sweet voice singed and caramelized to smoky heat. “Darling doctor.” Nearly incoherent, he gasps against Victor’s throat, wetness spreading between their bellies. He doesn’t relent but he can hardly stand it, the clench of Victor’s body around his own, the way his jaw falls slack and his eyes roll back as if blind by ecstasy.

“Again,” he asks, helpless to Victor. “Again -”

Sharp nails curl into his skin, tearing soft flesh beneath as Victor gouges Dorian as deep as Dorian digs into him. Heat blossoms and wilts, thin trickles of blood down Dorian’s sides, as Dorian himself gives way and groans aching against Victor’s throat, filling him with sputtering jerks of movement and a shudder that rips his release free.

“I love you,” Dorian gasps, before another moan takes him and he rocks hard against Victor again. “Oh, _God_ ,” he groans, body weakening heavy. “God, I love you.”

Victor curses, a soft and sweet thing, and turns his nose against Dorian’s silken skin as the other trembles above him. His fingers are slick with blood, as Dorian’s are with his release, they are a mess, sweaty and panting and filthied by the other.

Perfect. Utterly perfect.

“I love you,” Victor tells him, a sigh more than a word, and wraps heavy arms around Dorian to hold him comfortably atop. “Terrible, impatient creature that you are.”

Dorian turns his hips again, despite his own gradual softening, just to feel Victor’s legs curl against his sides once more. He is terrible. He is impatient. He is demanding and cruel and he is in love, hopelessly and cataclysmically in love, with Victor Frankenstein.

He seeks out his doctor’s mouth by way of his throat, pulse still shuddering to a slower pace. By way of his jaw, firm and strong, weakening beneath these shared affections. Finally Dorian, half-blind with the unholy thrill that Victor sends like lightning through his body, finds the corner of his mouth and bends their kiss together.

Little things. Gentle things. Everything that they are not in nearly every aspect of their lives comes to life between their lips. Dorian spreads a shaking hand across Victor’s cheek and smooths his hair back from his face, sighing against his mouth. Another kiss. Another.

“Incorrigible,” Dorian agrees, the both of them. They melt together, a tangle of arms and legs conjoined in the tiny bed with its stiff springs and thin mattress. Dorian opens his eyes enough to watch the bloom fade from Victor’s cheeks, and then closes them again when his doctor’s fingers spread through his hair.

“Will you show me now,” he asks, grinning. “Now that I’ve come all the way to the miserable East End for you? Show me your whore and let me know with whom I contend.”

Victor makes a sound, sleepy and fussy and turns onto his side, taking Dorian with him, grinning briefly when the elegant boy loses his balance and flails to regain it. He needn’t, with how Victor holds him and never wants to let him go.

“It is a mess.”

“Your whore?”

 

“My _atelier_ ,” Victor snorts, opening one eye to regard his lover before him, smiling softly when Dorian narrows his eyes, as a cat would before a wriggling jump on their unsuspecting prey. “And I suppose thus my work as well.”

“Are we not all messes of humanity amidst its masses?” Dorian purrs against him, and Victor hums his reluctant agreement. He lifts his hand from Dorian’s back again, regarding the drying blood on it, eyes down, next, to the lovely man before him who seems to care little for the damage, who had relished in the pain.

More unbidden thoughts rise to the surface, of blades and blood and Dorian’s lips parted on the sweetest little keens of pain.

No.

Not now and certainly not here.

“Wish you to see it?” Victor asks him. “Truly?”

Dorian takes in the earnest expression and the wariness behind it, just a pale shadow across Victor’s brow, a deeper dimple on his cheek. He smiles, readily, and kisses that dimple, and kisses his brow, and kisses again his mouth that asks those questions with such sweet uncertainty.

“You sound like John,” Dorian smiles. It builds to a laugh when Victor’s expression troubles. “Keats. All great artists are afraid to show their work to another. Consider me a patron then, adoring. Willing to invest in you endless praise and pleasure in your work, no matter the form it takes.”

He kisses Victor firmly, wrapping an arm and leg across him to press their bodies tightly together in the confined space of his doctor’s bed.

“I want to know what you do,” Dorian tells him, rubbing his nose softly alongside Victor’s own. “Do you think truly that I love you only for this? It is a facet, certainly, and an enormous one at that,” he grins. “But not the only. I’d not have risked a skinning in coming here to find you were that the only reason.”

Victor’s smile curls his lips but just barely, just enough. He closes his eyes and rests against Dorian for a moment in silence, sharing his breath, feeling his pulse, and then carefully he extricates himself from him to find a shirt and throw it over Dorian’s naked form.

“You will need your boots,” Victor warns, and Dorian grins.

“Just my boots?”

“If you wish.” A flicker of mischief in Victor’s eyes as he bends for his pants with a wince and slips them over his legs. He will need to bathe later, have his clothes cleaned. But all that can be done at Dorian’s house, later, when they make a mess of each other again. “But it is cold. I would suggest you dress.”

“Won’t you warm me?” Dorian asks, rolling to his stomach and lifting his feet into the air. Victor gives him a dry look and Dorian can only laugh, rubbing his cheek against the pillow beneath. He lingers long enough to breathe it in again, this restful place where his doctor on occasion of exhaustion sleeps, rich with the oils of his skin and the scent of sweat. Dorian is dizzy with it when he slowly drags himself upright and stretches - feline, arms spread and fingers splayed before him - before forcing himself to stand.

He sighs, burdened, as he shrugs into his shirt again without bothering to close it. And then his pants, tedious things - those he buttons up only enough to keep his cock tucked inside. Upon appraisal of the high riding boots he wore, Dorian decides to forgo them despite his doctor’s admonitions.

It isn’t as if he’s going to catch his death, is it?

“I am yours,” Dorian declares, tossing his hair back from his face with a broad smile.

Victor regards him, shirt loose from his shoulders and pants nearly falling off his narrow hips. He lets his gaze drift lower still to Dorian’s bare feet, and sighs. With a slight smile, he inclines his head.

“As you say.”

And he turns, for Dorian to follow.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Life," Victor murmurs after a moment, swallowing and stepping closer to the tub as Dorian continues to explore the desk, arched up on elegant toes in the mess. "My intentions are to create life."_
> 
> _Dorian’s rifling through the sketches pauses, only for a breath, before he turns to regard Victor across his shoulder. There is no dismay, only a burgeoning curiosity, mingled with amusement in the lift of a brow._
> 
> _“Ambitious.”_

The doctor leads them through a narrow corridor between bookcases until they come upon another, seemingly their barrier. Without a word, Victor sweeps aside the case on heavy hinges, smiling when Dorian presses against him, delighted.

"More curious by the moment, darling," Dorian murmurs, grin wide. "What other surprises have you for me?"

"Few things surprise you."

"You do," Dorian replies, honest, and Victor sets a palm to his cheek and traces his thumb against plush bright lips. Then he turns to lead them into his workshop.

The space is vast, the attic of the entire house, it seems, heavy beams and deteriorating ceiling. The floor is messy, dust and leaves and stray papers that Victor stops trying to correct and clean as they go. Despite the apparent chaos, the workshop is entirely functional, cases of equipment and books, notes spread on a huge heavy desk, electrical machines and enormous cables lead every which way. A switchboard. A battery. A huge copper tub that hangs on thick chains in the middle of the space.

Victor stops before it, not close enough to see within, and raises his hands in a shrug, at once proud and embarrassed by his work.

He doesn’t have time to lower them before thin arms curl around his middle, and Dorian spreads his hands across Victor’s chest. Chin on his shoulder, he takes in the space, its scents of oil and brass, the burn of chemicals hanging in the air constant as London’s fog. There is another smell beneath that, like the tang that fills the air before lightning strikes.

He touches a kiss to the back of Victor’s neck before he releases him.

In comfortable and curious silence, Dorian wanders. He studies shelves stacked deep with glass bottles, some filled and labeled, others empty. Lifting a hand, he fans his fingers above a tangled web of wires attached to a machine unknown to him; most here are, in fact, entirely occult in their purpose. With slow strides Dorian notes the equal parts care and disregard, spaces that have gathered grime and equipment polished to a shine.

“One can learn a great deal about another by the private spaces they keep,” Dorian says, folding his arms against the chill as he nears the copper tub, the laboratory’s curious centerpiece. “Those wherein their soul resides, locked away behind hidden doors and twisting passageways.”

Running his fingers along the edge of the tub, Dorian passes by it towards an enormous mahogany desk, stacked high with books and littered with notes. He traces an anatomical sketch there, a heart open to bare its inner workings.

“And yet,” he says, with a gentle laugh as he looks back to Victor. “For the life of me, I cannot fathom your intentions.”

Victor’s lips curve at the choice of words and he allows his eyes to wander a little, over the rafters hung heavy with wiring, and across the equipment he had adapted and adjusted to suit his means. He wonders how Dorian will respond to the work and intentions behind it. He wonders why he is not thrumming in panic at the thought of telling him.

Perhaps because he knows Dorian.

Perhaps because he understands how heavy a secret can be, and had so easily accepted Dorian’s own.

"Life," Victor murmurs after a moment, swallowing and stepping closer to the tub as Dorian continues to explore the desk, arched up on elegant toes in the mess. "My intentions are to create life."

Dorian’s rifling through the sketches pauses, only for a breath, before he turns to regard Victor across his shoulder. There is no dismay, only a burgeoning curiosity, mingled with amusement in the lift of a brow.

“Ambitious.”

Victor smiles, weakly, but it’s the best he can manage and no less genuine for it. “To say the least.”

Lifting up a drawing of an arm, cutaway to reveal layers of muscle and bone beneath, Dorian breathes a laugh. “I’ve always enjoyed the concept of God as an artist,” he says. “Splashing light and darkness across the world, life and death, in whatever seems necessary for the canvas.”

He sets the page carefully back in place and turns to lean back against the desk, stretching lean. Dorian’s gaze settles curiously on the elevated tub. He bites back the foremost question, pressed against his teeth, and asks instead, “How does one begin? Are your attempts to wrangle the spirit back to flesh before it can escape, or are you starting from the clay?”

Victor’s smile comes a little easier, he finally takes a step and moves from his stoic position where he stood like a schoolteacher in the middle of his lab. He too draws fingertips over the rim of the tub, but unlike Dorian before, he looks into it. A pause of consideration and he fans his fingers slightly.

"Ashes to ashes," he says. "And dust to dust. And once both are long enough pressed they become clay, in their own sense, don't they?"

"You flirt with death?"

"My whore," Victor snorts softly. "Who never leaves me be." He gestures Dorian forward, eyes still down at whatever is in the tub. He approaches slowly, more to extend the thrill of his own anticipation than out of anything near alarm. Before he looks, Dorian slips a short curl of hair behind Victor’s ear and warms a kiss against his cheek.

They exchange a smile, brushing nose to nose, and then Dorian turns to look.

Within the basin is a man laid bare. Sallow beneath saffron waters, a Y-incision cut across his collarbones and down his center, stitched carefully shut. He does not appear at rest - the dead never do - but in a state of preservation, held in state against the pull of decay and entropy.

Dorian’s breath leaves him - a gentle _oh_ \- as his blood beats thickly in his veins. Here the scent in full that he licked acrid from Victor’s fingers, formaldehyde sharp enough to dizzy him. He sets his hands against the rolled rim of the tub and pushes to his toes, rapt.

Breathless, he asks softly, “And tell me, dearest doctor. Have you found success?”

Victor’s throat works in a swallow and he nods, though Dorian cannot see him. And thence comes the fear of secrets revealed in this place. The secret of his life's work and obsession.

"Thrice," Victor admits.

“Thrice,” echoes Dorian, his gentle laugh carrying on it a note of near-ecstatic delight. “Thrice you’ve restored this,” he says, “to life again.”

He drops to his heels and turns, fingers swiftly snaring Victor’s shirt to drag him close. His doctor stands stiff with uncertainty, stretching his neck as if to relieve an ache when Dorian kisses his cheek.

“It is no wonder, then, that other physicians disregard you. No wonder at all that the medical field at large will not discuss your work. Victor,” Dorian breathes, framing his doctor’s face in his hands to force their eyes to meet. “Who would not envy one who has harnessed the power of God?”

"Is it?" Victor asks him softly, bringing a hand to Dorian’s face, cupping his cheek and stroking beneath his eye. "I have yet to harness it," he sighs, resigned. "They live but they are not alive. Cold skin and no heartbeat, no possibility of healing the scars they wear. Reanimated but not brought to life."

"They?" Dorian’s eyes widen, his smile brightens. "You let them live."

"I let them exist. How could I not when it is my fault the are once more jolted to a mortal thing."

Dorian lets his hands slide from Victor’s cheeks to his neck, resting gently as if by the warmth of his touch alone he might ease away the cold tension ratcheted tight in his doctor. His discomfort, Dorian cannot help but find charming. A sense of duty to once-human creatures despite the revulsion that Dorian can see writ large in the lines of Victor’s face.

It is miraculous that he has done the unthinkable.

He is miraculous.

“And so they exist now,” Dorian asks, not bothering to temper his fascination or the excitement at finding himself so near something so unconscionably taboo. “Do they walk, then? Speak? Have they memory of who they were before or how death took them? Let me meet them,” he demands, biting his lip in a grin.

Victor visibly pales and his pulse hammers quick from its restful beating. He shakes his head.

"They have left me," Victor tells him. "One destroyed another, the third left, curious, on her own into the world. I don’t know where she is."

"Her?"

"Women are more amenable to this sort of revival, adapt quicker, regain memories faster -"

"Then why can I not -"

"Because I do not know where Lily has gone, and my first creation is not a cruelty I would wish on anyone with his tedious company."

“Lily,” Dorian breathes, a strange sort of reverence infusing the name. He shakes his head as if to clear it, overcome with a curiosity that nears towards _thanatos_ left unchecked. “Was that her name before?”

“No.”

“You named them.”

“No.”

Dorian shakes his head again and crushes away Victor’s frown beneath a rough kiss, bearing him backwards. The morgue table, shining white, clatters as Victor is pressed against it, and Dorian laughs.

“Darling, enough, enough of _no_ and shame. What purpose is there in guilt but to staunch one’s own progression for the sake of others’ propriety? Victor,” Dorian whispers. “You should be proud of what you have done. They speak, then, if they give tedious company. They move among London’s throngs and you here, locked away, for what purpose? This is far beyond the scribblings of poets or dribbling of painters. Your achievements should be heralded for the world to know!”

"I would be put in an asylum," Victor reminds him. "Locked away here at least it is by my choosing, not theirs. And I can work, here, I can do more, I -"

Dorian kisses him again and Victor quiets, taking the soft gesture to calm himself. He rests a palm warmly against one of Dorian’s hands and presses their foreheads together.

"Poets and artists create beauty to be revered."

"And you?"

"Monsters," Victor breathes. "Beautiful and inexplicable monsters."

“Who among us is not?” Dorian asks, his smile twisting wry. Victor’s lips part as if in apology and Dorian kisses him with a hum to quiet it. “They are no more inexplicable than the poem that spills from a writer’s pen, moved by some greater force perhaps but still their own creation. Is life itself, unlikely in all ways to persevere in this world, not the pinnacle of creation?”

“It is,” Victor whispers.

“Then you must know, beyond how others have filled your heart with guilt, what an extraordinary thing you have done,” Dorian tells him. He gathers Victor’s hands in his own and brings them to his mouth, nearly trembling with delight. He works it out into a laugh, sighed against Victor’s fingers. “Let me meet them. I am capable of enduring tedium, darling, I assure you -”

"No."

Victor doesn't raise his voice, he is not angry, he is simply resigned, a cool weight on him like a blanket not functioning as it should be. This, he realizes, was his greatest fear. Not that Dorian would shrink from his work but instead be drawn to it, no longer invested in a breathing and broken human being when he could explore his creations instead.

"I don’t know where they are," he repeats, and that is only partially a lie. He knows Proteus once lay at his feet, cold and dead once more, torn asunder by a jealous brother. Lily had left on her own, seeking the tugging pull of her own curiosity. And his first creature, unnamed and unwanted...

He would rather create another thing like this than to know Dorian and that thing spoke as men. He shakes his head.

Dorian’s marvel does not cease, not even as he eases away Victor’s frown with soft lips pressed against his own. He does not ask again, not now, but he reels with wonder at Victor’s abilities and what they have brought to bear. That such beings wander London’s street, identical to the living around them but for the secret stillness of their hearts - Dorian could laugh for it, truly he could.

It is a fascination and no surprise at all that London is full of such mysteries.

After all, he is one of them.

The kinship he feels, having never seen the creatures his doctor so detests, is profound. That Dorian’s own heart beats at all is a mockery of the muscle that moves humanity, no different than the thoughtless movements of pistons upon a steam train. It is a lie, a masquerade, Dorian is no more living than the creations that shackle Victor in guilt.

And yet Victor is, whole and human and capable still of all those tangled webs that stir and sedate mind and heart. Dorian spans a hand across his brow, through the cold sweat that chills his skin. He holds back his curls in a gentle grasp and nuzzles his cheek. He kisses him. He brings his other hand to rest on Victor’s chest and leans into him until Victor cannot help but wrap Dorian in his arms.

Here, too, is kinship.

“I know,” Dorian whispers, his arms snaring snug over Victor’s shoulders and around his neck. “I know how it feels to look upon one’s own sin, and despite every intention to create a thing of beauty, find only horror within. I know, darling.”

There is relief there, brief but entirely overpowering, and Victor clings to this beautiful man and wonders what he could possibly have done - exquisite, clever Dorian Gray - that is monstrous. He is anything but monstrous. He is nothing like the horrors Victor has created.

"One day," Victor breathes. "One day they will be indistinguishable from human beings. Warm beneath their skin, clever and creative. Living eternal not in agony but in delight of it."

Dorian sets his teeth to his bottom lip and pulls it into his mouth. He tucks his nose against the curve of Victor’s throat and nuzzles, gentle little motions.

The words wound, far deeper than any scratches down his back or the slip of a knife. With stoicism born of centuries, Dorian trains his expression and tone both to neutrality, but the concern lingers. He lifts his gaze, and when he takes in Victor’s eyes, they are wide with promise.

The promise of life eternal.

The promise of death delayed.

The promise that Dorian once sighed idle into the air as a portrait was painted that contains within it greater truths as to the nature of existence than whatever puppetry moves Dorian’s limbs to stirring each day.

“Perhaps,” he ventures, careful as the first press of toes against new ice. “Perhaps one life more than those they spent. Or angled instead to give another chance to those whose times ended unfairly short.”

Theory.

Philosophy and speculation.

Nothing more, no. Nothing more than that.

"One lifetime is never enough," Victor says, wrapping his arms tightly around Dorian and kissing his hair. "Never enough time to learn and experience and mature to enjoy yourself. Schooling and work and death, it is an endless cycle, Dorian, I want to break it. Find a way to live forever, give more time to those who have of it so little."

Dorian tenses beneath the kiss that follows. Friction pulls his spine straight when Victor’s hands spread to relieve it, and he sets his hands against Victor’s chest to gently push away. He is not let go so easily, expression shadowed as their eyes meet.

“More time,” he says, “is not all time.”

“Dorian -”

“No. Think not of the short term, a lifetime or two to continue what one could not finish,” Dorian says, brow creased. “Think, Victor. Not in years or even decades. Think in centuries.”

“And how much could be accomplished then,” Victor insists, but when he lifts his hand to Dorian’s cheek, Dorian twists free of him, hands raised.

“Yes,” he laughs, mirthless. “How much, then. As one’s world changes around them, and they, immutable. As their family die and their children wither. As anyone they have ever known or loved turns to dust, lifetimes lived which they can convey to no one - the loneliness, Victor -”

He lifts a hand higher as Victor parts his lips.

“ _That_ is monstrous,” Dorian whispers, shaking his head.

Victor watches him, says nothing as Dorian’s pleasure in this work dissolves into anguish and anger. To Victor, there is no fear in watching acquaintances die. He will move on, he is sure. Even his friends, those who truly care for him, he will let go of if he must.

But he cannot let go of Dorian. He cannot cause him that pain, of watching Victor age and die, of watching him wither and forget.

"I have to try," Victor murmurs.

Dorian asked for this. He insisted, time and again, to be shown the nature of Victor’s work and to know this intimate part of him. To see past the trappings of a common physician and into the mechanisms that pump Victor’s blood faster through his veins and fill his lungs with air each morning.

He begged to see.

He has seen enough.

“Thank you,” Dorian says, “for showing me.”

And with a polite inclination of his head, he turns to go. He does not stop. Not here where he is idolized for something born out of whimsy and curiosity that has gnarled and grown gangrenous, not here where the most loathsome consequences of his choices are upheld as desirable. Dorian hears, as if from a great distance, Victor call for him and his footsteps follow, but between the laboratory and the door, the door and the stairs, Dorian continues.

He leaves behind his coat and jacket, his boots and scarf, and emerging into the thickened fog of night, Dorian wonders if perhaps the cold might take him by the time he returns home.

And he laughs, knowing it will not.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Come here.” Dorian’s tone strikes sharp, carrying in an echo from the bowels of the house._
> 
> _Victor has no choice but to follow._

Victor debates not following, he debates letting this end here and now as a clean severance. An hour, he manages, before he gathers Dorian’s discarded things to take with him. He flags down a carriage, watches for Dorian on the road but does not see him. Perhaps he had walked off the road, perhaps he had also taken a cab.

Because he could not be dead.

Even if he so wanted to be.

Closer and closer they get, and Victor wonders if perhaps Dorian had misheard, misunderstood, what he said. Repeating and replaying their conversation over and over and realizing that his claim to need this did not come with a reason. Victor curses, buries his face in his hands and waits, as the carriage shudders over cobblestones. 

At the house, Victor doesn’t knock. He knows the door will be open. Within, he sees no light to suggest where Dorian could be. With another whispered curse, Victor sets off to find him within the estate house. Room by room his footfalls fill and find nothing. Room by room and then -

"Dorian?" The ballroom echoes with his voice, through the sliver of light that comes from behind a usually hidden door. Victor does not violate that space, not without invitation.

This silence is laden, intentional. Victor knows all too well the hum of electricity in the air, though none yet runs to this place, aging as the boy who lives within does not. No, this is the static of presence, of tension, rippling enough to raise the hairs along his arms as happens before a snap of lightning.

“Come here.” Dorian’s tone strikes sharp, carrying in an echo from the bowels of the house.

Victor has no choice but to follow.

Compelled by whatever force holds them so bound, pulled as if they are conjoined - if one were to break apart, the other would suffer too, as they do with only days between them. Hours. Hardly that, now, as Victor sets a hand to the moveable portrait that acts as door to a hallway framed in mirrors.

Each step grows heavier, each breath requires more focus to fill his lungs. Victor is well-acquainted with fear, but when he has felt it, it has had a known quantity to it. This is something else entirely, a primordial and ancient dread of the darkness. The void. The unknown that is lit before him only by the pallid promise of candlelight.

At the hallway’s end, a windowless room. Circular and stretching tall, Victor wonders how far he now stands beneath the earth. His throat clicks in stark silence, as before him stands immortal Dorian, swathed in a robe. In his hand, a candelabra, and before him, a framed painting, enormous.

“Come here,” Dorian says again, without turning his eyes from the image before him. “And see what you would wreak upon others.”

Victor steps closer, eyes on Dorian, noting how although his feet are filthy they are not frostbitten or damaged, that his face is not paled by the cold. He moves to stand near Dorian and turns his eyes to the painting.

Victor has seen horror, he has created horror himself, within himself and within others. But he has never seen anything like this.

The figure in the painting is only barely human, bent and contorted by pain and years, chained down. Upon its skin are endless scars and lesions, pimpled skin from burns and blackened skin from frostbite. It holds within it an air of pride and anger, and as Dorian slightly turns his head to Victor, so the painting's eyes flick to the doctor as well. 

Beautiful eyes, young despite the age of the rest of the creature that possesses them. Familiar eyes. Loving, warm, kind eyes. Mischievous eyes. Dorian’s eyes.

"This is your beautiful immortality, doctor," Dorian breathes, and Victor realizes he is crying only because his tears burn hot against his pale cheeks.

He has seen horror.

Never like this.

"Oh Dorian," he breathes, feels the man tense beside him anticipating cruelty and anger, pain that will immediately filter to the cracked paint before them. "Beloved, how you've suffered."

Dorian does not look to his own reflection. He knows it better than the falsehood that meets his eyes in mirrors, he sees it in himself where others see what they desire. Instead, he watches Victor, eyes wide and cheeks damp, Dorian’s tensions pulled taut enough to snap. He would shed blood here. He has before, when cornered by those he has dared allow to know him could not accept.

“The paint thickens, every decade or so,” he says, his tone so mild that it draws a choked sound from Victor at his side. “There are layers and layers beneath, what you see now is but a fraction of what festers foul beneath the surface.”

He forces his gaze away as Victor brings his hand to his mouth, and Dorian steps closer to himself.

“A wish come true,” Dorian says, “and nothing more. That I might live forever young and beautiful and know all the sensations in the world. Is it as lovely as you imagined? Am I?”

Victor sighs and lets his eyes follow Dorian, his Dorian, where he stands before the framed horror of his own choices. He is beautiful still, always so. Even with this secret now laid bare before his doctor.

Victor steps closer, again, and rests his arms around Dorian’s middle, his forehead between his shoulders. What can he tell him? That he could never be as wise as Dorian, no matter how much he reads or claims to know. That he was wrong. That he wants nothing more than to stay and never go again.

"I have to try," he says again, snaring Dorian tighter when he snarls his displeasure and tries to twist away. "I have to try because I cannot put you through the pain of watching me age and die. I cannot leave you to spare you from it, I am too selfish, so I have to try, Dorian, to find away to join you in this instead."

Dorian’s lips part as his brows draw in. He has no eloquence for this, no words to fill the widening gyre that Victor has just rent open within. Across his painted reflection, shadows twist and darken in echo of the agony that sunders Dorian wide.

It is unfair that his hideous imago should steal from him such sweet suffering.

He twists in Victor’s arms not to pull away but to pull nearer, curling a fist in the front of his coat and burying his face against his doctor’s shoulder. The flickering wicks of the candelabra held aloft betray his trembling, his weakness, he wants this and he does not, he wants Victor and there can be no happy reconciliation for that.

“Or find a way to let me go when you do,” Dorian manages, his whisper abraded harsh. “I would,” he says, he begs, “I would.”

Carefully, Victor wraps his fingers around Dorian’s hand and takes the candelabra from him, setting it aside so he can hold Dorian closer, enveloped safe against him. He does not want to think about Dorian’s death, after years of life and experience and pleasure. He cannot. Yet he cannot deny him his wish either.

They will be together in the end, that much he knows. Whether for decades more or as long as this lifetime lasts them.

"Let me try," Victor whispers. "And if I fail we will look for another way. Together, Dorian, always together."

Dorian slips his arms around Victor’s neck, his back to the painting. “You have to try,” Dorian says softly, and it is not a demand, but an acknowledgment.

He lets himself be lifted and finds that Victor’s eyes are not on the abhorrent truth of Dorian’s reality but on the one he claims as his own truth. Their gaze meets and holds, intimate as any kiss, and gently, Dorian lifts his fingers to thumb away the wetness beneath Victor’s red-rimmed eyes. Few enough times to be counted on one hand has Dorian ever dared to show the painting to another. None of those attempts have resulted in two yet breathing to leave that room again.

Dorian cannot kiss him, his breath too gossamer-fine already as he sets their lips to only touch, instead.

“Thank you,” he whispers. “My dearest doctor.”

Victor hoists him higher, to free him from the pain of memory and lifetimes of agony, from stale air and wet paint. Dorian reaches to snare a single candle and with a breath, blows out the rest.

The house seems to keep silent entirely as they move through it, as Victor carries Dorian to his bedroom and lays him down, takes the candle to set into the ornamental holder by the bed.

Dorian lies unmoving, just watching Victor as he works off his coat and his vest and shirt, his shoes next, his pants. He watches as his doctor crawls to rest atop him, strong arms holding him up over Dorian before he ducks his head and presses their lips together in a gentle promise.

Together.

They will try together.

Dorian traces Victor’s jaw with his fingertips, pressing against the movement of it as their kiss widens and closes together, accompanied by the quiet sounds of their own broken resolve and resolute abandon. He is bare beneath his robe and when Victor lies against him, their hearts reach syncopation, harmonized pieces of a yet unknown whole. In his experiences, Dorian cannot help but acknowledge that there are forces greater than mankind, and as Victor’s body settles to fit rises and hollows in compliment against his own, he thinks of the children of the sun, and wonders how they have found each other so entrenched in shadow.

_Beloved, how you’ve suffered._

A whimper, uncharacteristic in its fragility, presses between their mouths before Dorian lays back. Victor’s hair parts beneath his fingers, eyes wide and blue as Dorian once knew the Thames to be. Bowed lips part to seek another kiss but Dorian shakes his head, body stiffening.

“How accustomed to the grotesque you must be,” he whispers, “to kiss me still.”

Victor allows his lips to part, eyes hooded in his pleasure, and watches Dorian beneath him.

"How accustomed I am to the grotesque that I see none before me now,” he amends, drawing his nose in a nuzzle against Dorian’s, before kissing his cheek, the corner of his mouth, his lips. His hands seek to bare Dorian further, robe pushed off his shoulders, sliding down pale thighs as Dorian spreads them and draws up his knees.

All the more beautiful he is, now, for his truth. All the stronger. He is a man of endurance and softness, incredible kindness now burying any malice once spawned from him.

"I love you, Dorian Gray."

Dorian surrounds Victor with arms and legs, holding fast with heels hooked against his thighs and hands against his back. The words burst sweet as summer berries against his lips and just as warm, their kiss a slow and careful thing now that unkind words and ambition have bruised them both.

“Again,” Dorian breathes, no longer the demand of earlier in the evening, now a plea that to his ears makes his own voice unfamiliar in its weakness. “Tell me again.”

Victor grasps Dorian by the thighs and pushes him higher up the bed, propping his back against the headboard and then taking hold of it with both hands.

“Dorian Gray,” he whispers again, brows pressed together, with kisses to pepper as punctuation between every word. “I love you, always.”

What kind cruelty this, that shakes Dorian to laughter, a little and winsome sound. He lets his hands frame Victor’s face and makes himself small beneath. If Victor seeks to keep Dorian from his own ill-fated stars then Dorian will allow him to try, to protect, to shelter and to feed his own remarkable mind and bold heart in doing so.

They kiss as if they cannot stop. They kiss because they cannot stop. Small and fluttering teases; languid and deep explorations. And between each, as if to claim penance for his sins and feel them so gently forgiven, Dorian whispers his own _mea culpa_ with a widening smile:

“I love you. I love you. I love you, Victor Frankenstein.”

“Always?” Victor asks, bright-eyed and breathless.

“Forever.”

Another laugh then, a dire sealing of their fates with this. Both know this is to their detriment, one way or another, in immortality or a death together. It is both frightening and perfect - neither has had a reason so strong for existing before, than for the other.

Victor knows they will fight, cruel words slung in blindness and anger; he knows they will leave marks in anger and both will wear them. He knows, he knows and does not care.

He ducks his head and takes a nipple between his lips, feeling Dorian jerk and moan, squirming beneath him in pleasure. He sucks, and knows that this will last forever too, their frantic lovemaking, angry fucking, fondling and play and cuddling. He knows that Dorian will stray, will return home and claim no one will fulfill him as Victor does, and Victor will believe him, despite misgivings, despite taking a higher dose of morphine after and claiming exhaustion over caresses.

He knows.

Their love is consumptive. 

So he pulls free of Dorian’s skin and breathes heavy against it. So be it.

Dorian clings to him, knees squeezed tight to Victor’s ribs and fingers lodged in his hair. With a rough tug he brings their heads together and traces the shape of bow-curved lips with his tongue, along each in turn and then a long swipe up from the dimple in his chin before he sinks to Victor’s mouth again. What has happened between them both tonight is unprecedented; hours before it would have been unthinkable.

What they do and who they are, laid bare and ugly before the other, and neither finding the other wanting.

No, to the contrary. Through the filth and grime that day to day defines their existence, they see only beauty blossoming rare and lovely before them. Their hearts beat martial rhythms of passions unchained by taboo and their minds reel with promise of what those passions might yet yield. Their kisses are heady as wine, shared breaths thick as opium smoke. Intoxication is but another word for poisoning, and their bodies respond with shortened breaths and violent pulse.

Dorian pushes Victor low again, to tend his other nipple. Back arching lithe from the bed, Dorian laughs when Victor’s surprising strength holds him bent as though he were a martyr slain for keeping in faith in what anyone else would call unholy. Victor quickly found how sensitive Dorian’s chest is to these attentions and became relentless in his worship of it. Dorian groans as Victor suckles wet against that pebbled nub, and with a curl of his hips, Dorian ruts lazy against Victor’s hip.

“Please, Victor," Dorian laughs, writhing away from his doctor’s sharp teeth and skilled tongue. Another tug of cropped curls brings Victor’s eyes to his, and Dorian's lips part with a shaking sigh. "Lay claim to me in this way, too."

Victor watches him, eyes soft, and another blink brings them closed. He sighs long and sinks against Dorian again, this time to just press against him, hearts beating together, fingers gentle against arms and hands and cheeks and lips.

“In every way you wish,” Victor tells him, swallowing gently and turning his face against Dorian’s fingers to kiss them. He wants him, he wonders if ever, even in their anger, he has not wanted him. Immediately from the first meeting to this last, Dorian lights a heat within him that Victor cannot control or stifle, and he is unsure if he wants to try. There is something comforting in knowing your own doom and facing it.

Dorian squirms against his robe and Victor snares him closer. Kissing down his chest and taut stomach, he smiles as Dorian parts his legs for him, wide and willing and entirely open. Victor wonders absently how so few weeks before this was entirely new to him, how not even a month ago he would have blushed at the thought, would have denied it outright, with a man.

And yet.

He draws his nose in a nuzzle up the side of Dorian’s cock. For a moment all he does is breathe, to feel it twitch - Victor parts his lips over the head and lingers just so. Dorian’s heavy exhale and soft little laugh are his rewards, and Victor finally wraps his lips around him and sucks. He funnels his tongue, curls the velvet arch of it against the taut foreskin and hums, eyes closing in his pleasure as beneath him Dorian allows himself to fall to bliss.

Dorian curls, legs drawing up to either side of Victor’s head. He splays, pushing his toes spread into the sheets and raising his hips toward the ceiling. A gentle buck finds the back of Victor’s throat and he braces his hands against Dorian’s thighs. The firmness with which he pushes Dorian back to the bed is enough to free Dorian’s voice in a long moan.

Victor is inexpert in this, inexpert in damn near everything they do. He tries to take Dorian deeper but chokes softly, eyes lifting in surprise when the sound and tension forces Dorian to bite his lip in delight. Perhaps one need not be practiced to share pleasure when it erupts so easily between them.

Plush lips swollen scarlet, Victor sucks off the top of Dorian’s cock with a quiet _pop_ and brings his mouth against the shaft. Wide kisses and curling tongue stroke sidelong across, Dorian’s hardness smearing spit against Victor’s cheek as he thrusts in reflexive response. Dorian watches, eyes scarcely seen through long lashes; his mouth hangs wide to allow his voice to carry on each hitched breath he can manage.

After centuries, it stands to reason that Dorian’s senses are honed towards the extraordinary. No longer can the mundane satisfy; no longer can pleasure be found in simple things. It is an endless tedium broken only by the exceptional, and as his belly coils tight, pulled taut by the working of Victor’s mouth, Dorian knows he has found that, here. A brilliant young man whose worth is vested in his work, who knows not the beauty in all that he does; a doctor who does not merely stave off illness, but who has created life itself. Gentle-hearted and dry-humored, sensual and virginal.

 _Forever_.

Dorian can give him no less.

With a twist of his spine and a flourish in his hips, Dorian forces Victor’s keen and capable mouth to release his cock, spit dripping thick and pooling in the dark hairs that curl at its base. He reaches to snare Victor’s jaw and drag him upward once more. Their kiss is messy, lips fiercely tangling.

Victor holds him close, sits back on his heels and pulls Dorian with him until they are flush, chest to chest, broad hands against Dorian’s back as his spread over Victor’s shoulders. Dorian sits closer, catching Victor’s hand as he tries to reach for the oil, shaking his head with a laugh. He doesn’t need it. Pain is pleasure for Dorian, as pleasure is heaven. And he wants everything, greedy and proud and alive.

It has been a while since Dorian has let someone claim him this way. In his youth, his genuine youth, he had enjoyed bending and arching for older men, men who saw him as a trinket and treated him accordingly. He enjoyed it because it offered him experience, it offered him the chance to see life outside of his sphere. For years, he was the one presenting himself and moaning into the sheets.

And now, for the first time in decades, he wants to again.

“Spread,” Victor sighs against him, soft and coaxing, smile tickling his lips as they brush. His hand seeks down Dorian’s back and between his cheeks, fingers careful and gentle in a way Dorian feels may be unwarranted. “Arch back.”

“Shall I beg?” Dorian whispers, grinning as his words spread a shiver through his doctor. He gasps as Victor pulls him wider.

“You needn’t,” Victor tells him, their foreheads pressed. “If you do as I say.”

“Tell me again.”

“ _Spread._ ”

Dorian moans, he laughs - he sighs and he parts his legs further. Curving their bellies together Dorian grasps Victor by the back of his neck and pulls him with as he lays against the sheets. They share breath, lips parted and touching but not yet closing to kiss. So close they can hardly focus on the other, their eyes still remain open, and in their gaze a consuming fire, now left unchecked, that both know will end in immolation.

The blunt pressure of Victor’s cock jerks Dorian’s voice into a cry. Shaking now, anticipation shears their nerves with electricity, and Dorian clasps his hands harder around the back of Victor’s neck.

“Have me,” Dorian pleads, squirming and arching his back toward the ceiling. “I will not repair it. Let me know you have been inside me, let me feel it for days -”

Victor kisses him to quiet him, swallowing promises and pleas as he slowly presses in, feeling Dorian willingly spread for him, part wider as Victor pushes deeper in. This is wonderful, the sensation near overwhelming, with heat and pressure and the comfort of knowing he is doing this with Dorian, and no other. His first in so many senses of the word. His last, he thinks, in every one of them.

“Hush,” he sighs, breaking the kiss to nuzzle against Dorian’s throat, bringing a hand down to tweak a nipple gently so Dorian squirms and arches harder, bucks down against Victor to push him further in. “ _Oh._ ”

There is blood. There is pain. There is ecstasy of agony and delight that spins Dorian’s head and sends his body reeling. He will not hush, not for Victor and not for this. His voice pitches high as Victor moves within him; a pause joins to a look of concern. Dorian releases his grip from Victor’s neck and instead brings trembling fingers to his cheeks, laughing even as his lashes dampen.

His doctor. His brilliant and beautiful doctor, whose pleasure in this first taste is painted upon scarlet cheeks and parted lips.

And then he thrusts, and Dorian cracks, a whimper rattling his laugh. He brings his legs to Victor’s hips and hooks his ankles, squeezing to feel his muscles clench when he fucks deep again. When they kiss it’s clumsy, both too breathless to maintain more than a drift of lips to lips.

Dorian has been here for every beginning of Victor’s carnal expression.

And Dorian will be here until the end of it.

As every first time, Victor does not last long, overwhelmed and delighted, touched in a way he cannot explain that he is allowed this, that Dorian wanted it and wants it still, despite the pain and the fumbling and the inexperience, Dorian wants this and he wants him. Victor comes with a soft cry, buried against Dorian’s neck in a kissed bruise. He shivers, body alight with energy, and pulls back from his own blinding pleasure to duck his head and suck against a peaked and sensitive nipple as he strokes Dorian to completion with him.

They are filthy, with semen and blood and sweat, with the residue of angry words and kept secrets no longer between them. They are breathless and exhausted and together.

“I will draw you a bath,” Victor whispers. “Have you clean.”

“And then?”

“Bring you back to bed and sleep atop you until morning.”

Dorian smiles. “And then?”

“And then,” Victor sighs, pulling free and resting against Dorian’s side, head against his bare smooth chest. “And then day by day we will do the same. Together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all for this first foray into the torrid relationship building between these two. There will almost certainly be more in the future, but for now - thank you for reading, for sharing, for your kudos and comments. We couldn't be more grateful on our inaugural journey into writing for this lovely fandom!


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